Blog

Shawna Ayoub Ainslie shares meditation-inspired tips for identifying your best writing ideas and clarifying your focus.

With writing, as with all people and practices that matter to us, we have to devote time and energy to maintaining their presence in our lives. Stacia Fleegal writes on how to be aware of the challenges and have a plan for balancing them.

Writers in touch with the sources of their inspiration are the ones who will keep writing. Stacia Fleegal offers tips for actively pursuing them, rather than waiting for them to strike, by cultivating self-awareness.

The coronavirus pandemic has the world in upheaval. We are distancing ourselves from others, isolating with our families, and working and learning from home. Our days probably look and feel radically different than they did even a few days or weeks ago, which might produce a great deal of anxiety, fear, and frustration. But we will be ok.

I saw a red-tailed hawk last week, camouflaged in winter white, no red tail flashing—playing on the wind! I stopped my car on that country road where I rarely meet another traveler. The hawk tumbled like a crow. I’ve seen crows play on the wind. This hawk wasn’t hunting. It was having a wonderful time!...

The five of us, myself and the four writers who registered for the retreat, had dined together. We then drove to the place that would be home base for the next four days: The Lazy Pond Bed and Breakfast, in the town of Liberty, New York, where I live. Lazy Pond is just down my road, but the others had traveled from all over the country.

A semicolon has been used to punctuate complete thoughts within a sentence; it is somewhat arcane, I’ve thought, and been replaced by a period or an em dash (—). The above sentence could also be written this way:...

A beautiful snow is falling, coating everything. Here in this woods, once snow falls, in December or January, it doesn’t melt until the end of April. But this morning’s covering is fresh, fine. It may be what my farmer neighbors call a sugar snow, for the maple sap that will soon run. But I don’t know these secrets, coming from the concrete streets of Brooklyn...

I think the eyes open when one writes, just as they do when one paints, to a more subtle, finely-tuned world. I’ve just looked up from my notebook. The snow on the hemlock trees past my window makes a fine, latticework pattern. I didn’t see that before I started this writing. It’s a glimpse, a vision of bright order. Outer to inner eyes. I think I’ve gasped...

The snow has at last melted here. Three solid days of rain, and the daffodils are bursting! In the days before I painted flowers from my garden, and also in the days before my investigation of the use of yellow grew deep enough to dazzle me, I’d take note of the daffodils I’d brought up here, from my garden on Long Island, and how they poked through the leaves first, the garden still bedraggled and delinquent...