This is a terrific workshop because all the young people who attend want to write. We don’t have the make them write. They are writing on their own volition, and not just in class. They write in the their free time. They write in groups with someone offering a prompt. They gather in clusters of like-mindedness and share their work for critique. They are thick-skinned (sometimes after a rite of passage for first-year participants) and they understand that their goal is to become a better writer every day, every time they pick up the pen, and that becoming a better write may require them to lower their standards and write badly before the good stuff can come. These young writers understand what it means to write toward their stories, to feel around in the dark for the things they need, the objects and gestures and lines of dialogue and the surprises their characters give them. The elements they find in the dark illuminate the story they are searching for or illuminate how a story they already know can be best told.

What struck me early this week is that these young writers wrestle with the same issues all writers wrestle with. Growing up or growing older doesn’t cure you of insecurity, a vocabulary curve, an unhealthy obsession with adverbs. Writing well is always work on some level, and it is work writers should embrace will all the enthusiasm of this crowd of young writers. They can learn a lot from writers who have achieved some success. But we can also learn a lot from them.

Go be enthusiastic about writing. Don’t fall victim to that stereotype of the tortured writer. Accept the joy of your obsession and go take joy in it, even if it sometimes brings you to tears.

One of my favorite exercises is to ask students to list as many one syllable words beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet as they can. Each of us has an active vocabulary (words that come easily to us in speech and in writing) and a passive vocabulary (words we know the meaning of but don’t use readily). As a writer you need as many words at your disposal as you can muster. This exercise helps remind the writer of words he or she knows but might not think of when writing a first draft. And many one-syllable words are good solid specific nouns and verbs. They work like bricks to build a strong image or sentence.

The next part of the exercise is to write a story with only one syllable words. Only proper nouns can be multi-syllabic. Try it. You’ll be surprised at what you can accomplish with only one-syllable words.

This week’s Scene Storm Word List comes from the letter C and all are one-syllable words:

course

coast

carve

cool

crease

core

crisp

cord

cone

curl

The email forward:

Women and heart attacks (Myocardial infarction). Did you know that women rarely have the same dramatic
symptoms that men have when experiencing heart attack … you know, the sudden stabbing pain in the chest, the cold sweat, grabbing the chest & dropping to the floor that we see in the movies. Here is the story of one woman’s  experience with a heart attack.

“‘I had a heart attack at about 10 :30 PM with NO prior exertion, NO prior emotional trauma that one would suspect  ight’ve brought it on. I was sitting all snugly & warm on a cold evening, with my purring cat in my lap, reading an
interesting story my friend had sent me, and actually thinking, ‘A-A-h, this is the life, all cozy and warm in my soft, cushy Lazy Boy with my feet propped up.

“A moment later, I felt that awful sensation of indigestion, when you’ve been in a hurry and grabbed a bite of sandwich and washed it down with a dash of water, and that hurried bite seems to feel like you’ve swallowed a golf ball going
down the esophagus in slow motion and it is most uncomfortable. You realize you shouldn’t have gulped it down so fast and needed to chew it more thoroughly and this time drink a glass of water to hasten its progress down to the stomach. This was my initial sensation—the only trouble was that I hadn’t taken a bite of anything since about 5:00 p.m.

“After it seemed to subside, the next sensation was like little squeezing motions that seemed to be racing up my SPINE (hind-sight, it was probably my aorta spasming), gaining speed as they continued racing up and under my sternum breast bone, where one presses rhythmically when administering CPR).                                 

This fascinating process continued on into my throat and branched out into both jaws. ‘AHA!! NOW I stopped puzzling about what was happening — we all have read and/or heard about pain in the jaws being one of the signals of an MI
happening, haven’t we? I said aloud to myself and the cat, Dear God,I think I’m having a heart attack!

I lowered the footrest dumping the cat from my lap, started to take a step and fell on the floor instead. I thought to myself, If this is a heart attack, I shouldn’t be walking into the next room where the phone is or anywhere else ..
but, on the other hand, if I don’t, nobody will know that I need help, and if I wait any longer I may not be able to get up in moment.

I pulled myself up with the arms of the chair, walked slowly into the next room and dialed the Paramedics .. I told her I thought I was having a heart attack due to the pressure building under the sternum and radiating into my jaws. I
didn’t feel hysterical or afraid, just stating the facts. She said she was sending the Paramedics over immediately, asked if the front door was near to me, and if so, to unbolt the door and then lie down on the floor where they could see me when they came in.

I unlocked the door and then laid down on the floor as instructed and lost consciousness, as I don’t remember the medics coming in, their examination, lifting me onto a gurney or getting me into their ambulance, or hearing the call they made to St. Jude ER on the way, but I did briefly awaken when wearrived and saw that the Cardiologist was already there in his surgical blues and cap, helping the medics pull my stretcher out of the ambulance. He was bending over me asking questions (probably something like ‘Have you taken any medications?’) but I couldn’t make my mind interpret what he was saying, or form an answer, and nodded off again, not waking up until the Cardiologist and artner had already threaded the teeny angiogram balloon up my femoral artery into the aorta and into my heart where they installed 2 side by side stents to hold open my right coronary artery.

“Iknow it sounds like all my thinking and actions at home must have taken at least 20-30 minutes before calling the Paramedics, but actually it took perhaps 4-5 minutes before the call, and both the fire station and St. Jude are only minutes away from my home, and my Cardiologist was already told to go to the OR in his scrubs and get going on  estarting my heart (which had stopped somewhere between my arrival and the procedure) and installing the stents.

“Why have I written all of this to you with so much detail? Because I want all of you who are so important in my life to know what I learned first hand.”

1. Be aware that something very different is happening in your body not the usual men’s symptoms but inexplicable things happening (until my sternum and jaws got into the act).  It is said that many more women than men die of their first (and last) MI because they didn’t know they were having one and commonly mistake it as indigestion, take some Maalox or other anti-heartburn preparation and go to bed, hoping they’ll feel better in the morning when they wake up … which doesn’t happen. My female friends, your symptoms might not be exactly like mine, so I advise you to call the Paramedics if ANYTHING is unpleasantly happening that you’ve not felt before. It is better to have a ‘false alarm’
visitation than to risk your life guessing what it might be!

 2. Note that I said ‘Call the Paramedics.’ And if you can take an asprin. Ladies, TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE! Do NOT try to drive yourself to the ER – you are a hazard to others on the road. Do NOT have your panicked husband who will be
speeding and looking anxiously at what’s happening with you instead of the road.

Do NOT call your doctor — he doesn’t know where you live and if it’s at night you won’t reach him anyway, and if it’s daytime, his assistants (or answering service) will tell you to call the Paramedics. He doesn’t carry the equipment
in his car that you need to be saved! The Paramedics do, principally OXYGEN that you need ASAP. Your Dr. will be notified later.

3. Don’t assume it couldn’t be a heart attack because you have a normal cholesterol count. Research has discovered that a cholesterol elevated reading is rarely the cause of an MI (unless it’s unbelievably high and/or accompanied by
high blood pressure). MIs are usually caused by long-term stress and inflammation in the body, which dumps all sorts of deadly hormones into your system to sludge things up in there Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let’s be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.

I don’t know how to make a small pot of soup; my husband doesn’t know how to plant a small garden. While three 400-foot rows of beans means a lot of picking, and people are starting to run from us when they see us coming with sacks of yellow crooked-neck squash, all those beautiful vegetables will make for some good soup this winter.

What excess do you see in your life? What excesses do your characters have, either self-imposed or thrust upon them?

Assignment: Write a scene where a character’s excess comes into play.

Assignment: Write a poem about your excesses or the excess of someone you know.

Scene Storm Word List: Here are 10 verbs associated with gardening. Use the in a scene or poem that has absolutely nothing to do with gardening.

rake

dig

cut

pick

plow

weed

hoe

dust

shell

seed

Summer is always a little crazy for me because I teach at so many workshops and conferences.  While Dancing with the Gorilla maybe be a little sporadic this summer, I’ll do my best to post Thursday posts with Scene Storm Word List and keep up the Tuesday post as much as possible. I’ll post  Friday’s Five and Ten and Wednesday’s Hump Day as often as I can in the midst of traveling.

Today’s Scene Storm Word List comes from my handout for my fiction workshops on point of view:

bough

pot

jury

withheld

lipstick

balance

deep

roll

scrub

edge

Lincoln Memorial University has a long and rich literary heritage, including graduates such as writers Jesse Stuart, James Still, Don West, and others. Other writers-in-residence have included Emma Bell Miles and, most recently, Silas House.

While at LMU, Silas House, along with co-director Denton Loving, founded the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, now in its sixth year. The festival will be held this year on June 11, 12, and 13, and boasts an impressive list of staff and guests: Gurney Norman, Caroline Herring, Ann Pancake, Anne Shelby, Ron Houchin, Sue Massek, Kate Larken, Amy Greene, Bev May, Linda Parsons Marion, Jeff Daniel Marion, Judy DiGregorio, Maurice Manning, Silas House, and Denton Loving, with help from Sylvia Lynch and me, Darnell Arnoult. Additional expected literary sightings include the likes of novelist Pamela Duncan. For more information about the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival, visit: www.lmunet.edu/mhlf/

Silas leaves big shoes to fill. Fortunately he’s not really leaving; he’s just moving up the road to Berea College, where he will hold the National Endowment for the Humanities Chair in Appalachian Studies beginning August of 2010. Silas will be stirring up some more literary magic across the line in Kentucky. We at LMU, however, will keep hold of his wrist or ankle or pinkie finger. House has agreed to remain a co-director of the festival, and he and I hope to find additional ways to foster collaboration between LMU and Berea creative writing programs.

Silas recently co-founded, with Jason Howard and Marianne Worthington, the online literary journal Still: The Journal, based in Berea and named in part for LMU graduate and well-loved author of the novel River of Earth, James Still. The current issue of this fine journal may be found at http://www.stilljournal.net/.

Here is a photograph of the writer’s house at LMU, where I’ll be staying until William and I can find a new home for his forge and welding studio and we can get ourselves and our dogs relocated—I hope on a nice piece of property large enough for a couple of good horses. William is pleased we won’t be any farther from The Big South Fork, and he’s already heard rumors there’s good riding in the Chuck Swan Wildlife Management Area on the peninsula surrounded by the waters of Norris Lake.

I’m already making short-term and long-range plans to get more folks invovled in creative writing at LMU. Keep checking Dancing with the Gorilla for more about the LMU Writer’s House and what’s on the calendar and on deck for creative writing at LMU!

For more information about Lincoln Memorial University and the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum, visit www.lmunet.edu.

Today’s Scene Storm Word List comes from Mountain Heritage Literary Festival guest fiction writer Ann Pancake’s novel Strange As This Weather Has Been:

Lincoln Logs

root

rags

drapes

ashamed

sprint

tears

monkey

gap

mine

If you think that makes Tomi sounds busy enough, well there’s more. She is also a freelance editor and writing coach, and writes the blog Media, Motherhood & Mayhem, which you’ll find at http://twiley3ms.blogspot.com.

Tomi is a single mother of a brilliant four-year-old boy who is learning to read, which means she can no longer S-P-E-L-L what she doesn’t want him to know about.

When does this woman find time to read? I don’t know. But she does. Tomi is a force of nature. And here’s her beautifully eclectic list of ten recommended reads:

 On Beauty by Zadie Smith

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates

On Writing by Stephen King

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

Packing Light by Marilyn Kallet

As a former TWA board member and a presenter at this year’s TWA WordFest at Cumberland University in Lebanon, TN on June 19^th, I’m including a message from Tomi about WordFest with info about how you can participate.

I don’t know about you, but I am super excited about WordFest ’10, which is coming up June 19 – in just a few weeks! If you haven’t sent in your registration yet you have until June 1 to get the early discount. For your convenience, the registration for is on the TWA website at www.tn-writers.org. Visit this site for the downloadable form and more information.

Pleaes note the reception has been relocated to the Cumberland campus, which will be convenient and lovely. We look forward to some great workshops and networking opportunities, so send in your form soon and tell your friends! If you have any questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to email me.

Also, the deadline for submissions to the summer 2010 edition of The Tennessee Writer is July 1. Please email me with your article ideas or suggestions, and if you’d like to review a book please let me know. Feel free to send in photos (as high res JPEG attachments) of your corner of Tennessee or something pertaining to your writing. Again, feel free to contact me with questions, comments or suggestions.

Write on!

If anyone would like to contact Tomi about her writing, editing, TWA, The Tennessee Writer, or WordFest ‘10, Tomi’s email address is TnWriterEditor@gmail.com.

Lastly, it’s Memoiral Day Weekend. I hope you have a great one. While you are busy at a cookout, or swimming at the lake, or taking a trip on this long weekend to visit family or see the some natural wonder, remember that this holiday was instituted to honor our veterans.  Please give these brave men and women a though and thanks in the midst of this busy weekend.

The news media has not fully conveyed the extent of the damage from recent flooding in Middle Tennessee nor the devastation for a huge number of individuals, families, and businesses. Many of these families and businesses did not have flood insurance. That’s the dark side.

On the brighter side, Nashvillians are pulling together to help one another. Neighbors who didn’t know each other before the flood have become friends and collaborators. Those unaffected by the flood waters are sharing with and caring for those who were effected beyond imagining.  You too can pitch in to help. If you would like to help those effected by the flood, visit this website and find out how:

https://app.e2ma.net/app/view:CampaignPublic/id:29309.6672448176/rid:a2a8b6447793a779b2106feb7ec35dde.

And thank you to the Tall Girl Skinny staff at songwriter Marshall Chapman’s newsletter for sharing this info with their readership so that I might share it with you. 

In fact, lets go with this thought of helping our fellow human beings in need. Let’s think about what it must be like to see all you own or most of what you own gone in a matter of hours or minutes. I understand this feeling all too well, but my loss was by fire five and a half years ago.

On Christmas morning I was reading poetry in the living room and my husband William was working on a sculpture in his shed, a.k.a. studio. The lights went off and I got up and walked toward the breaker box thinking all I had to do to fix the situation was flick a breaker. But when I crossed the threshold to the kitchen I smelled wood burning. We didn’t have a working fireplace. I spun toward the side door and ran to the shed.

“I smell wood burning in the house,” I called to William as I rounded the corner of the shed. He came out and turned with me toward the house to see a plume of black smoke pouring from the eve of the attic in the old cabin at the core of our house.

“Call 911,” William said as we both rushed to the house. The phone was in a single story addition at the opposite end of the house from the cabin. I made the call, and as I hung up the phone, William came from the other part of the house with his guns under his arms. I went to our bedroom, a former lean-to at the back of the cabin, and grabbed the big Tupperware box full of a life-time’s worth of pictures and family photos from previous generations and took them outside. William grabbed our computer and then our printer while I raked framed photos from shelves and tables into paper grocery sacks and tossed them onto the grass. I always joke when I tell this story that we are so Southern we grabbed the guns and the photos first.

Just that week I had sent the final draft of my novel Sufficient Grace to my editor and pulled all my old writing out of file drawers and boxes and tossed the pages and notes into a laundry basket. I was planning to go through it between Christmas and New Year’s to decide on my next writing project. I took the laundry basket full of papers out the door.

“Get clothes next,” William said to me as we passed each other at the doorway. “This is our last trip.” Most of my clothes were in the washer, unbeknownst to me just under the location of the fire’s origin. I stood at the washer pulling things out of the machine and putting them in yet another laundry basket when I remembered an antique print that meant a great deal to William and me, a print we’d taken images from for our wedding invitations. I left the close where they were and grabbed the print off the living room wall and left the house for the last time as the sirens whined up the driveway and into our yard.

My sweet husband had grabbed a coat for each of us. We stood in the front yard amid the fire engines and watched flames lick at the house we had hoped to remodel or replace. The horses stood at a safe distance. The dogs and cats were all accounted for. William walked around the house not fifteen minutes after the fire trucks arrived and said our bedroom was gone. This was 8:30 AM on Christmas morning. If it had happened a few hours earlier, we might not have made it out of the building. As we stood there and watched most of our stuff burn, we realized how little stuff really means, who happy we were to be alive and have each other and our children and grandchildren. We considered later how fragile plans can be and how resilient the human spirit, if you can only hang onto the hope-filled attitude.

News about the fire went out immediately, and we received help from friends and strangers alike. We met neighbors and got to know neighbors who were before only acquaintances. Because our friends and family and community pulled together, we were never without a place to stay or clothes to wear or food to eat. We had help cleaning up the mess and help as we started building a new house. And, because my husband and I are both optimists,  we were never with out hope or a positive vision for the future.

We are a long way from that fire today, and we are still recovering in material ways. In spite of that, good things have come from the changes that were thrust upon us.

I guess this month’s theme is becoming change and opportunity. If change strikes in a negative way, it may be a blessing unfolding. That sounds shmarmy, I know, but it may be true just the same.

By the same token, if you see disaster or devastation strike others, you are presented with an opportunity to help your fellow human beings. It’s an opportunity for you to become part of your community in large and small, but significant, ways. Become part of your neighborhood family, become a wealth of hope to those in need—whether you offer someone a free place to live, as our good friends Janice and Ben did for us when they made an empty trailer on their property available, or only donate rags and cleaning supplies to make it possible for someone to wipe the mud out of their flooded home. Seize this opportunity to be part of the solution and part of someone’s recovery and hope for a positive future.

We have just passed the Sunday of Pentecost, a time during the liturgical year when Christians celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit. The story is in the Book of Acts. Tongues of fire hovered above the heads of Mary and the Apostles as they were infused with the Spirit and began to speak to those people around them from foreign lands, and everyone understood what they said as if Mary and the Apostles spoke in a common language.

Today, let our common language be help and hope. Let it be give and receive.

 The scene storm word list for today comes from the Book of Acts:

companions

course

rushed

uproar

flesh

deputy

worms

basket

bond

scatter

Some of you know I’ve been on the Duke Writers Workshop faculty since the early 90s. I loved that workshop, it’s spirit, and the gifted teachers, students, and staff with whom I’ve had the good fortune to work. This year Duke University Contintuing Studies Program has decided to focus on professional certificate programs and cut it’s creative writing program. So there will not be a Duke Writers Workshop this fall.  BUT NEVER FEAR! Our leader, long-time director Georgann Eubanks, has rallied and we are reinventing this workshop as TABLE ROCK WRITERS WORKSHOP, named for the striking geographical feature visible from Wildacres, the workshop’s retreat center home perched at the top of a mountain in the North Carolina highlands near Little Switzerland.

We’ll have the same great leadership, the same dynamic faculty, and lots of new energy sizzling around our new name and our rededication to making this workshop an outstanding week-long event that includes both nurture and challange for its participants. For more on this workshop, please read Georgann’s blog post at: http://tablerockwriters.wordpress.com/

That’s just one product of this new energy. We now have a blog!

Assignment: Look around for learning opportunities in the area of creative writing. Every writer needs to invest in his or her craft. Workshops are a great way for unpublished and published writers alike to push themselves to new levels of work. Do your reseaerch and come up with three writers workshops, festivals, or writing events that you’d like to participate in over the next two years. Then, make it happen.

Sorting and purging can uncover things you love that you’ve forgotten about—out of sight, out of mind. The act of sorting and purging can also inspire. Ideas may begin to germinate as you find notes and articles you’ve forgotten about, books covered with dust. Maybe you made notes on a good idea and they are buried in the hurry and rush of everyday living and stacking, or maybe notes were tucked into the pages of a book you were reading at the time. Sometimes our best future emerges out of our rediscovered past.

My recent sorting and planning synergy has pointed me back to books I’ve loved. I’ve been rereading some classic novels from Appalachian literature, and I’m now finding my way toward new novels in that tradition that I have yet to read. James Still’s novel River of Earth got me started on this path.  His novel is a masterpiece of literature, I don’t care what category you place it in.  Character and language rendered with a loving, yet ethnographic eye and ear make this novel an inspiration and a treasure, as well as a window into the life of a particular time and place. The story of the Bladridge family is a forceful wave of cause and effect, the story voice a siren song, drawing the reader into the world of hard work, empty bellies, and tested and resilient hearts.

Next on my list to reread is Salt, a wonderful novel by Winston-Salem author Isabel Zuber, who was born and raised in Western North Carolina. Isabel is also an accomplished poet, and her command of language and image comes through in every sentence of  Salt.

Then, in preparation for The Moutain Heritage Literary Festival at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN on June 11-13, I’m going to read the novel Strange as This Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake. I’ve heard so many good things about this book; I can’t believe I haven’t already read it! For more information on this festival, visit: http://www.lmunet.edu/mhlf/

You’ve heard me mention the strange things that sometimes happen around a set of ideas floating on the surface of my mind. Yesterday, I walked through the early letters of the alphabet in Nashville Public Library’s general fiction section, and there, propped on a bookstand on top of a bookcase was Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker, another classic of Appalachian literature. I took that as a sign I’m reading down the right path for now.

My list of 5 recommended novels by authors connected to Appalachian are:

River of Earth, James Still

Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith

Salt, Isabel Zuber

The Dollmaker, Harriette Arnow

Child of God, Cormac McCarthy

Of course I have many more favorites, and I could easily have chosen five other books to make up my list. There are a host of other wonderful Appalachian novels. You’ve read about other good novels from the region in the pages of Dancing with the Gorilla.  These are just five of my favorites. I’d love for you to let me know some of the novels you love from this rich landscape and from authors whose voice originated in the high lonesome.

Today’s Scene Storm Word List comes from Isabel Zuber’s novel Salt:

chill

greasing

pump

chaps

faint

stock

shale

field

dents

towel

Isn’t that how writing is? We take a day off and it may turn into two, and then three, and then seven, and then a month, and then a few months. How easy it is to plant that seed of “putting off” and then let it grow.

The best teachers use parables to make their points. Where I grew up, you always talked about one thing when you were really talking about something else. If my uncle wanted to teach you to take care of your tools, he’d teach you to take care of your banjo. That practice is common in Appalachian culture, Southern culture, and in great literature. When I think of great literature and parables, I think of scripture, more specifically, The New Testament. Jesus used beautiful stories to teach His message.

This past week I was staying with a dear friend and went along with her to her church on Wednesday evening. She was leading a lesson on the parable of the talents. Here’s the parable from the Gospel of Matthew.

Matthew 25:14-30 (New International Version)

The Parable of the Talents

 14″Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. 15To one he gave five talents of money, to another two talents, and to another one talent, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. 16The man who had received the five talents went at once and put his money to work and gained five more. 17So also, the one with the two talents gained two more. 18But the man who had received the one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.  19″After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. 20The man who had received the five talents brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five talents. See, I have gained five more.’  21″His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’  22″The man with the two talents also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two talents; see, I have gained two more.’  23″His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’  24″Then the man who had received the one talent came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. 25So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’ ²⁶“His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? 27Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.  28″ ‘Take the talent from him and give it to the one who has the ten talents. 29For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. 30And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

In this parable, a talent refers to currency, money, and unit worth more than $1000. But if we bring that story into the present and think about the talents we possess ad individuals and what we do with them, it is easy to see how we squander our best selves sometimes because we fear the wrong things. We fear loosing face, losing money, losing status, when those things are given to us to invest in ourselves to grow and become better than we are at the moment.

When I don’t write, I feel like the servant who buried his talent in the ground out of fear. I would much prefer to be the “good and faithful servant” who invests in the talent given and makes more of it by using it.

Use your talents. Don’t hide them. Don’t bury them. Don’t deny them. Become the talented person you are intended to be. And if you don’t know your talents, get busy and find out what they are. That journey can be quite fun if you aren’t afraid.

Assignment: Write a parable. It can be a piece of fiction, creative nonfiction, or a poem. Tell one story, but really be telling us something else.

It’s good to be back. The gorilla  and I are dancing, and I’m not one bit afraid for my toes.