Writing Story / Finding Poetry / Freeing Voice

Dear Writers,
If I asked you to list the 10 events that have affected you most deeply in the past months since the new year entered or we entered the new year, in your immediate sphere, in your family, in this country, in another, in your love life, in your children’s lives, in your art, down the [...]

Claiming and Polishing the Power of Our Stories: Intensive critique classes online in fiction and memoir.  (10 weeks) Begins February 2, 2010! Classes every other week for 10 weeks.
This is an advanced writers’ workshop open both to writers who have studied with me, or those who have not but are invited to participate after sending [...]

March 10, 2009,
Below is an announcement for a reading this Friday in the Minneapolis area, near the astonishing Mississippi River.
I am racing to do too much. Little wheels spinning like a cartoon character. Haven’t posted. Great excuses. The world is the biggest. Visiting my senator (we still only have one in Minnesota), and my representative.
But [...]

July 30, 2008
Dear Writers, 
I wouldn’t exactly say I am on a roll, like some blog-crazy youngster, but I do feel the need to write more on writing, this big mystery, not as great a mystery as determining the location and nature of evil, or understanding what love actually is, but it is a grand mystery [...]

January 30, 2008 
I am thinking that every act is a creative act.
Only some creative acts provide an opening into something vital; other creative acts provide duplication, follow the path of habit, add to repetition, create walls – solidity – separation from the vital and the as yet unborn. And some acts, of course, create destruction. So, [...]

I wrote the below last week, in a snowstorm. I want to remind you to check the previous post, some good newsy stuff to notice, and to let you know that Grand Web Master Brian Tanaka has pointed to January 11 for the likely release of The Stories of Devil-girl novella-download, so expect more news soon. In the [...]

The Stories of Devil-girl is a novella which I recorded on a double CD set and released shortly before the war in Iraq broke out in 2003. It works at the crossroads of poetry and prose, and of autobiography and fiction, perhaps also of the brutal and the magical. I began writing it in 1989, [...]

So captured by the possibility of having a communal talk in cyberspace about this mystery of writing, that I am writing this, freewriting this onto the site, and it is, except in cyberspace, invisible. And this is what this posting is about, the invisible. And its power.
We know that at the moment we are at our [...]

I said that I was going to tell you a bit of a story about a painting by Jose Clemente Orozco (one of the Mexican social realist muralists (1883-1949) along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros)-”Gods of the Modern World”-and I will. But as with any story, there are a few places to stop [...]