In the early morning, the summer air is magnanimously cool. I rise before anyone else is awake. I sit on my little cushion, close my...

When I first picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was in a pretty bad place. I’d been a mom for about three years, and...

When writers talk about plot, the conversation tends to center upon inciting incident, rising action, and climax. But a novel’s ground...

For a very long time, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I became really anxious. It didn’t matter if I had two-hundred or...

Like so many other writers, I fell in love with reading at a young age. There were many things that drew me to words, including my love...

Oh, mama. Things haven’t gone as you’ve planned, have they? It’s eleven o’clock at night, and your baby has been screaming for the last...

I am, unequivocally, a sentence girl. I love the craft, the swing, of words that builds to create narration. Most of my experience with...

From an evolutionary standpoint, fear is very useful. It was fear—increased heart rate, tense muscles—that allowed our ancestors to...

About a year ago, standing near the cold cut display, I met a woman who said she’d been to infinity and knew the meaning of life. She’d...