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In her 39th post, Helena shares an original children’s story, and the writing exercise behind its inception.

I am still painting flowers in glasses. Different destinies. Different kinds of artists, people. Maybe stars. But it was a privilege to see, in a kind of secret act, that lovely little painting...

Soft-edged and dreamy, on a deeper brown neutral ground, so that the beauty of orange, with its green tones and reds, its yellows and lavender grays, is revealed. The image captivated me...

My older sister, Jolene, was the ringleader in our sister group. It was a group of only us two...We were an organism. Where did she stop and I begin? I can't find a fixed edge...

Children's stories with an accumulation, or a great multiplicity of something as its central theme and/or structure, go back to books written before I was a child...

Fifty-three years is a long time to contemplate who my mother was. And I see something else now, now that I bring my need for connection to life itself, without a parent to mediate...

I often mention to students what I call “The Writer’s Palette.” I call it that because I was a painter before I wrote. Most of my parallels come from painting...

My dad whistled. Cheer was part of his nature. He whistled around the house and in the car, and sometimes he sang.

It was the feeling under my father’s words that recorded itself in me. My father’s feeling was, then, and is now, my ground. Not his feelings. But his Feeling. The world of his feeling that included the cosmos...

Facets of clear amber stone that flash. There is a dimension between the flashes. Julie called it the interstices. That’s where the story, with all its trauma and love that Julie bequeathed me, lives.