Writing, No Writing: Guest Blog Post at North American Review

Here's my second guest blog post, "Writing, No Writing: Cultivating the Emptiness of the Page," at the North American Review: 

https://northamericanreview.org/open-space/writing-no-writing-cultivating-emptiness-page

The blog post opens:

"Normally, not-writing is rejected experience. Most writers value the popcorn sound of typing or other signs of productivity—a paragraph written, a journal page filled, a poem drafted, a noble goal of 3,000 words/day. The entire reason for prompts is to springboard writers out of the preverbal and into the verbal, for instance. We only begin to feel secure once language makes an appearance on the screen and the word count climbs. Each new sentence or line seems to rescue us from a perceived plight of failure, transporting us farther away from this face-off with nothingness..."

The Point of Now: Guest Blog Post at North American Review

To read the rest of this post, go to 

North American Review

The Point of Now

I’ve been recently asked if it’s possible to reconcile the work of the imagination with mindfulness. After all, mindfulness means observing the actual, not the imaginary, in real time with as much of an accepting, non-evaluative stance as possible. That actuality could mean perceiving changes in the flow of our internal talk, changes in our physical state as we write, or changes in our emotional condition, again, as we write.

This question feels particularly salient for creative writers who unlike scholarly or first-year composition writers, for example, devote their time at the desk to evoking scenes of elsewhere and the hypothetical interactions of non-existent populations. The imagination equals what could have happened or what could happen, but it’s not what’s happening right now. It’s a positing of believable possibility, the elaboration of alternatives. It’s adorned, what-if-ed, glittery, exaggerated, darkened, or pulled into different shapes...