GRIEF IS as much a part of life as all other emotions. The opposite of joy, grief is a particular kind of sorrow; it’s an emotional anguish so deep that it can seem bottomless. And when you’re in the middle of that bottomless despair, it can feel like there is […]
THROUGH THE WORK I DO to support journaling and memoir writers, I often meet people who want to write about their lives, but who are not really interested in publishing or promoting what they write. They don’t want to write a memoir — a theme-based work about one aspect or […]
WHAT IS THE NATURE and quality of your relationships with managers, colleagues, and clients? Do you have friendships with the people you work with? Do you get together with them outside the office, or are your work and personal lives kept separate? These are a few of the questions we’ll […]
WHEN IT COMES TO RELATIONSHIPS, what is dating? Does dating even fall under the term “relationship”? What if you’re not serious about the person and only dating casually? What’s the difference? If you perform a search on the internet about dating and relationships, most articles contend that you’re not in […]
AT ITS CORE, writing is about finding meaning in the mundane. That’s why some of the most satisfying and universal personal essays and stories spring out of completely ordinary events. You don’t have to have climbed Mount Everest or overcome a deadly disease to have something interesting to write about. […]
NEXT TO YOUR EARLIEST childhood friend, the friends you hung out with when you were a teen probably had the greatest influence on your life. As you moved into your teen years, you likely began to spend less time with your family and more with your peers. You started to […]
HOW OFTEN DO YOU THINK ABOUT your extended family beyond your grandparents — your aunts, uncles, and cousins? The importance of these relationships are mostly unrecognized in our culture today. Yet, involved aunts and uncles can have tremendous positive impact on children. Not only emotionally, but economically as well. For […]
“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” ― Louis Adamic GRANDFATHERS — We don’t write much about them, or at least I don’t see much about them in the stories I read. Why is that? Do they not take up much space in our lives? […]
IN THESE DIVIDED AND STRESSFUL TIMES, we are experiencing a sort of collective trauma. Every day we read about or watch events unfold that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago: Nazis marching and chanting in the streets of the United States, cars plowing into crowds as a […]
SUMMER. When everything swelters, and the world seems as though it’s come to a halt in the heat. When you retreat indoors to your air conditioned space or, maybe, travel somewhere exotic just to get away, it’s a good time to journal about the season you’re in. I’ve created a […]
FREEDOM! In the U.S., we say we are “the land of the free.” The lyrics of our songs, extoll the virtues and necessity of freedom: Let freedom ring. Sing your freedom, because there’s nothing in the world like freedom, freedom of speech / freedom to say / freedom to think / […]
ARE YOU SELF-CRITICAL? Get down on yourself for making mistakes or not meeting your own standards? If so, you’re definitely not alone. Many of us run a constant inner dialogue that sounds something like this: I can’t do anything right! Who would want to read anything I write? What an […]
