Illustration by Zoe Wagner What if We Already Loved You? 11 years ago, when I started dating again after my divorce, I was excited at the thought of meeting new people, but I was also riddled with nerves. I’d been with my husband for over 24-years, and here I was...

A Few Things I Won’t Be Writing About How the 20 something nurse assistant looked down at her clipboard during my appointment and asked me if I was sexually active. And the way I said no – with no qualifiers – no comments about the dating pool for...

It helped that I was dirty, that I hadn’t showered in three days, and that what we called “shower” meant standing naked in the sagebrush in the late afternoon sun, in the middle of nowhere New Mexico, and lifting a hose over our heads. It was the miracle of clean...

(1) When the llama, who looked to be my age, maybe younger, said he’d been diagnosed with bipolar and depression in his 20’s, he said it so sweetly, so softly. He’d heard about depression, but until he experienced it, he said he had no idea. And because he didn’t have...

If you find yourself with a pen in your hand, but you don’t know what to write. If you mean to put down a few lines, but you’re speechless, and you don’t know what to say. If you find yourself staying in your pajamas for hours, promising yourself that you’ll get up,...

The house didn’t get cleaned because I was going after the anxiety, playing a lot of solitaire, re-writing the list, looking ahead at the calendar, considering my next move, wondering if I’ll need hiking boots and a rain coat for New Mexico, wondering what it will be...

“They don’t have to be good,” said my friend, Rosemerry, “but they do need to be true.” This is the bar my friend, the poet, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer set for herself when she set out to write and publish a poem a day in 2011, which was 12 years, and roughly 4000...

When I was starting out as a writing teacher over 20 years ago, I remember talking with my friend and mentor Mark Dahlby who ran writers.com, where I taught writing to adults for many years. I must have been going over the classes I was teaching, and at one point Mark...

As I write this, I’m sitting on a hotel bed in San Miguel de Allende on the eve of a writing / photography workshop that my dear friend Andrea Scher and I are hosting this week. This might be our 10th workshop in San Miguel in the last five years. Some of the ladies...

One of the first things I noticed when I walked into my mother’s house last  Sunday night was that she had taped the same printed message on little pieces of paper all over the house – on her bathroom mirror, on the wall across from her bed, the refrigerator, by...