At the 20th Power of Words conference Oct. 3-5 in Kansas City, I had the honor of giving the welcome talk, which I realized speaks to more than just people engaged in Transformative Language Arts (writing, storytelling, theater and other word arts for social and personal transformation and community building). So I share this here, hoping we all find meaning, stubborn hope, and belonging. At our first meeting, you could see how different we were by our shoes: Birkenstocks, w

Double rainbow in Ennistymon I must have been five or six when I first saw a picture of Ireland and knew I would go there one day. I'm...

I believe this is a story tree, likely 300-400 years old In the middle of the forest, I fell in love with ponderosa pines. For some years...

Mary in front of her home, photobombing the peonies one spring day in the pandemic When our friend Mary died less than a week ago, her...

After the first surgery in 2019 Dear wonderful readers, I've missed you lately and have missed posting as regularly as I wish. There's so...

Hanging out in real time with some of my tribe at Kat's memorial celebration At the tail-end of a bad bout of the flu I realized what...

Between the prairie and the lake I'm just back from Brave Voice, deep in the Flint Hills of Kansas -- here is a piece I wrote there,...

My new book, The Magic Eye: A Story of Saving a Life and a Place in the Age of Anxiety , is hitting the streets and bookshelves near you...

In the face of so much happening so fast, it's hard to know what to do, especially when cruelty is at the wheel. So it's no wonder that I...

Friends walking in our field In the very long year that was January, Cindy, my acupuncturist, told me a story: another client of hers,...

I've been thinking lately about how we can be refuges of acceptance, calm,and love for each other. After all, it's been and it is a...

One of my favorite pictures of Kat being Kat Determination, kindness, curiosity, and presence. That was Kat, so it was no wonder that,...

"You'll be happy to hear we didn't kill a dear," my son Daniel's friend Dan told me two weeks ago when the two Daniels hauled their bright..

Happy birthday for a 2nd time On Christmas night, the first night of Hanukkah, and my sister-in-law Karen's birthday, we light a bunch of...

Ronda reading at the 2014 Power of Words conference. Photo by Stephen Locke. When Ronda's son Scott called me Monday with the news of her...

"How are we? How do we think we are? We are just waiting to die," Nanny (my grandmother) would tell me when I asked how she and Papa (my...

Just about everyone I know is carrying a backpack full of anxiety, dread, despair, or anger, sometimes weighing into terror or rage. We...

On Friday night, I shared this poem at Shabbat services at my synagogue. As I read it, I remembered how, when I wrote this some years...

“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so...

“Don’t read the news, at least not the feeding frenzy of speculation about the election,” I keep telling myself, and for good reason....