Posts Tagged ‘Flannery O’Connor’
First Notice Everything
Each year when I see peonies in bloom, I think of what we used to call Decoration Day. Each Memorial Day, my parents and I drove from one country cemetery to another. We brought coffee cans full of peonies and irises. We filled the coffee cans with gravel. We wrapped them with foil paper. I…
Read MoreMy Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson
(In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m giving another life to this old post.) As I dream of spring on this cold January day, I’m reading through some old letters from my mother, written in her widowhood, and I’m struck by the sound of my own voice in hers and the lesson she offers the writer…
Read MoreContradictory Layers: A Writing Exercise
Characters are interesting when they’re made up of contradictions. It’s those contradictions and the writers who recognize them that create the most memorable characters in works of fiction and nonfiction. If we give our characters’ free will—if we don’t fully know them too soon—they can take us to some interesting places that can either illuminate…
Read MoreTo Cherish the World: A Christmas Wish
I was back in my native southeastern Illinois last week, and I happened to have a little dust-up with a stranger at the local fitness center. Let’s say we should have agreed to disagree and left it at that, but we didn’t. She, a very nice elderly lady, broached a subject she shouldn’t have brought…
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