My social media feeds usually have a smattering of posts from people I don’t know asking for money, especially from friends of mine reposting messages from their friends who have fallen on hard times. Needless to say, I’ve been seeing a lot more of those posts over the past year, as the loss of work caused by the pandemic has devastated tens of millions in America alone. This is especially true for those who work in art-related professions, as the ongoing economic crisis has forced…

Read More »

Writing a screenplay for The Prostitutes of Lake Wiishkoban between the initial short story I came up with, and the novel it eventually became, was kind of a weird step to take, but one that was necessary for me. I’d taken a screenwriting class in undergrad, and while I’d never written a full-length screenplay before, I’d written an act of one, and a screenplay felt like a natural progression from the short story that I wrote, which felt like it was too compressed (probably because…

Read More »

Now that I’ve turned in final grades for this past semester, I should have more time over the next week to work on my bigger projects. Even though spring semester doesn’t start until the 25th of January, I will have some extra preparation to do for that, simply because I’ll be teaching two courses I’ve never taught before, as well as my first creative writing course in over a decade (which will require more work for me because it was originally scheduled for another instructor…

Read More »

This past July marked twenty years since I started The Artist’s Way for the first time. One of the tools of The Artist’s Way is what author/creator Julia Cameron calls Morning Pages: Three longhand pages of stuff written every morning, without fail, shortly after waking up. When I first read through the book before starting the programme, I was incredibly reluctant to even try doing Morning Pages, not just because of the time commitment involved but also because they felt like they’d be pointless to…

Read More »