...and then...

It. has been. a YEAR since I've sat down to write. From this side of my pen, that is. Writing projects, yes. Scripts for one-woman shows. A children's book. A 11-minute poem that I performed with the Milwaukee Ballet.  Nothing to boo hoo about, at all.  Except these words weren't, necessarily, for me. I might have etched five poems, but I would have stirred them in a workshop I was leading or supporting. Not sure if that counts as writing for myself. When I started counting on my fingers, my eyes tracking absently across the ceiling, the math was incomprehensible. I thought of friends I'd giggled with about their comparable sex dry spells. A year, girl? A whole year, like twelve months, back to back, f'real?  My bad, y'all. In this past year, my best words were tiles for funding mosaics, grants and proposals, strategic plans, contract agreements and curricula, social media posts, text messages -sometimes a panel's worth, and eight trillion emails. ...

If we examine our opinions, we can trace the tpuzzle seams between where we've been and what we truly know. I strive to be responsible with my opinions. Feed them a balanced diet of facts, perspective, narrative and whimsy. My opinions don't aspire to be big and strong. Just healthy. They don't yearn to be popular or franchised, just authentic and, hopefully, sturdy. Even when they appear to match, opinions have unique owners. "Defending" our opinions should mean sketching their lineage: origin, influences, close relatives, familial mergers, adoptions and a nod to the season they spent "discovering themselves." Opinions offer shorthand for our emotions, experiences and unasked questions. Question your opinions. Test them in private to see if they can answer for themselves. If they're nervous or insecure. Are they loud? Lazy? Misinformed? People pleasers? How do your opinions respond to inspection or opposition? Are they holding a grudge? We...

We were all hugs in the middle of the coffee line.  Ours was a long overdue sit down now gift wrapped in a new project. We chatted through the line to a table by the window. Our sitting tipped the tiny cafe's count to "half full," joining a man with the newspaper, a pair of women studying and a shop regular who tittered with the barista while buying her bulk beans. My coffee mate and I were laughing and catching up, taking advantage of the holiday time warp. Not long into our conversation, a young guy walked through space and asked if we knew Mr. Wilson. We didn't. The young man moved on, melting into ambient cafe shapes and noises behind our conversation. Standing on the opposite side of the high table next to ours, the young man blurts out "HOW MUCH?" but to no on in particular. He walked out. We raised our eyebrows and kept talking. We were coasting into the brainstorming portion of our meeting when my coffee-mate's gaze was pulled beyond my s...

One: Last year during my trip to Botswana, a local woman did a double take after hearing me speak. "Where are you from?" she asked. "US," I said. "Agh!" She perked with surprise. "You look like Botswana woman. You have Botswana fi-gaah." Two: Arriving in Botswana this year, the customs agent droned her questions: nature of visit, number of days, country of residence, country of birth. Hearing me say "USA" twice, I noticed that she hovered above a thought before deciding to speak it aloud. "You look African." I thanked her and asked what would distinguish an African woman from a black American woman. "Your fee-chaas," she said, using an index finger to make a circular motion around her face. I thanked her again, smiling. Three: Chatting with my hosts as we were leaving a cafe, I overheard two ladies comment as we passed their table about being surprised at my accent (funny. me. from Wisconsin. with a...

It's astonishing how regularly my life compass swings back to hover and twitch above the idea of Permission. (Clearly, with a capital P.) I mean, how many times must I relearn a sharp lesson, like how many shakes of red pepper is too many for the sauce or how this wannabe shortcut fails into a one way street or how the spindling seed of every liberating decision in the past 10 years has been to grant myself permission to be good and kind to myself? To honor my gifts. Pursue my dreams. Expect exceptional love. Splurge every now and again. Prune my inner circle of brush and thorns. Speak my truth, always. Be good and kind to me for no reason at all. I've had the "Permission" conversation with myself to release the internal tension all these things have produced. For more than a decade, for instance, writing anything that hadn't been commissioned or wasn't being shaped expressly for the stage felt selfish and indulgent with so many emails to check, laundry to ...

When you start referring to your new protagonist like a colleague you're hoping to connect with for lunch, this is how you know you’ve found your next story. That’s how I know, anyway. For months, I’d been sending lunch invitations to a character I’d met in a short story. He was a young boy then, and I wanted to know what his story might become. How did he recover? What was that thing churning in his chest? Would he be chasing life or evading death? I couldn’t know. From our brief exchange, the only thing I was certain of was that he was quiet, observant, and deeply affected by the scenario I’d written him into.  I was eager to finish his story, but he would not come. He wouldn't even give me his name! I thought, maybe, I needed to speak of him out loud in order to make him Pinocchio-real. I thought, maybe, I should start another story to coax him from my mind’s shadowed alcoves. I thought, maybe, he wanted me to sit patiently at my laptop and wait. Once, I ...

A mournful black sky stretches in dutiful silence Contracted for a millennium to canvas the night To drape an infinite stage To withstand the urgent infernos fastened to its darkness The stars hiss and crackle in their banter Impetuous in their spinning Precocious in their tumble and games of chase A mournful black sky stretches in dutiful silence The stars dance shamelessly, anyway