Reflections

June ushers in summer with an abundance of memories: family weddings, high school and college graduations, anticipated or completed excursions to favorite destinations, or maybe travel to new ones. This year, for me in 2026, this month is also about making changes – a new look for my website and a new direction for my writing. First, the website. Since January, I’ve been working to update the existing site to better represent my brand. From the Write Side has been my baby for

As winter settles in, I reflect on the meaning of giving, the beauty of simplicity, and the gifts that matter most, shared moments, meaningful words, and the people we cherish.

A quiet reflection on gratitude, connection, perseverance, and the people who leave lasting marks on our lives.

The abundance of leaves already on the ground invites the kid in me to scuff through them. I can’t resist the urge as I listen to the crunch and imagine myself off on an adventure with hobbits, attending a ball in Bath with Jane Austen, or practicing archery with Catniss. Fiction offers so many amazing escapes, and the bigger the volume, the better the read! This outlook explains why I gravitate to fiction first. I’m a storyteller who loves stories. Any well-written novel wil

As a teacher, I always equated September with the beginning of a new journey…new classes, new students, revitalized and revamped lessons…building on the past and adding the new to the future ahead of us. That, in turn, got me thinking about how we creative types move beyond the comfortable into the unknown to produce new work. To foster that for myself, I made a brief list of ways to move outside of the familiar. #1. Attend and speak at a Poetry Slam. Whoa, this was very far

This summer has been a hot one, challenging to work in the garden, sit on the porch, or exercise outdoors. Instead of a long end-of-summer piece, I thought I’d share a few learnings I’ve taken from my summer travels and reading; Adrian Dominican Sisters motto: Seek truth. Make Peace. Reverence life. Words and works to live by. Marcus Borg: The principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. We should work to erase shame and replace it with hope. Gregory Boyle, S.J.: Ma

This hot and sultry month of July, it can be tempting to put our feet up, sip a summer drink, and stare into the horizon…and there’s nothing wrong with that! The creative muse inside each of us stirs to life when we make time for inspiration to arise. I find much about July to send my imagination spiraling. Below are a few ways I keep the ideas coming even as it’s “summertime, and the livin’ is easy…” #1. READ! I up my reading game during the summer, and July is the best mont

One of the singular joys of this time of year are the homegrown strawberries in my patch of sweetness right outside the screened-in porch. Over the past seven years, I have planted and re-planted, coaxed and protected, and waited every spring for the shoots to wake, flower, and grow the red fruit. This year, we hired a lawn care service to weed for us. The conscientious young man did a vigorous pruning and much of the extended patch was gone after he left. At first, I was dis

bring a book along! And since I’ve read a few interesting, thrilling, beautifully-written, or thought-provoking books lately, I thought I’d use May’s blog to recommend a few of those. Thus, a possible reading list… Romantasy: The Raven Scholar by Antonia Hodgson is a new member of the ‘academic fantasy’ genre. Clever, so well-constructed, filled with intrigue, twists, heroes and villains and the magnificent Raven (who speaks in first-person plural). If this is your fave genre

Even a single word, well-chosen, can evoke myriad sensations; taste, touch, sight, sound, memory. I love language, the cadence of consonants and vowels, the way each separate language has various ways to express and explain. I love studying language, especially the interaction between a specific sound and emotion, how one well-placed noun, adjective, or verb can transform the tone of the written and the spoken word. When I write poetry, I spend more time than one would think

In this most roiling political climate, the question arises about what actions we can take individually and as a group, to effect positive change and protect our democracy. After all, I am only one person without a million dollar bank account and no real power. I am not unaware of the climate in which we are living. I acknowledge that bullying instills fear, that threats of violence to ourselves and our families can be used to dissuade us from speaking out. Then I remember t

As we enter the shortest month of our calendar year, I take stock of the many books I read in 2024 and look ahead to reading, writing, and bookish things in 2025. So many good books (and a fair amount of weak ones – but that’s a subject for another column), so little time to get them all on my shelf. I’ve not completely abandoned purchasing, after all, there are some I simply have to hold and cherish. However, no room remains on my the shelves, so I visit the library frequen

“Another year over and a new one just begun”…every time I hear these lines from John Lennon’s song “And So This Is Christmas,” I’m carried into the melody and the haunting question which is also part of the song, “and what have you done?” The inevitable Q and A the lines require has me pondering the reason for such introspection. Then there are the admonitions of all resolution pundits: Take stock. Plan ahead. Make a stand. Fight the good fight. All the platitudes and mott

It has been a challenging year in every way: politically, economically, creatively, and personally. No matter the challenges, time does slip by. Here we are at the tail end of 2024, contemplating what was and what is yet to be. If Lady Justice were truly blind, the scales would not have tipped so far toward the unacceptable. But my view is not shared by so many others. How then do I square what is right and true with has happened? I cannot. All I can do is persist in the beli

When November winds come calling and the prairie turns golden in the early dawn, my mind revisits the poetry and songs that address the month and its impact on humans. Inevitably I recall Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the evocative tale of the loss of a boat on Lake Superior. Once the words get stuck in my head, they tumble over each other, the music and lyrics chilling. Hard to explain why, for me, a single song can so quickly invoke the force and

September never arrives without the image of Bilbo Baggins starting out on a journey of adventure and discovery…a tale that makes my feet itch to walk the trails, hike through the forest, climb mountains, to seek out the wild and wonderful that surrounds us. OR I can simply settle back and re-read The Hobbit. Books do that for us, create mind pictures of people, places, and wonders, real or imagined, that speak to us long after we have finished the read. Great books draw us b

Rejection is part of the process of writing, but it’s never easy. Experienced authors claim you get used to it, accept it as a normal step in growing your writing career. There are times, however, when all those No’s grow from molehills into mountains, when you think you can’t make one more pass at that brass ring. That’s what this summer of 2024 resembles in my own work. Full disclosure, I’ve concentrated more on producing new writing than on sending out work, so the handful

This summer has been a hot one, challenging to work in the garden, sit on the porch, or exercise outdoors. Instead of a long end-of-summer piece, I thought I’d share a few learnings I’ve taken from my summer travels and reading; Adrian Dominican Sisters motto: Seek truth. Make Peace. Reverence life. Words and works to live by. Marcus Borg: The principal suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. We should work to erase shame and replace it with hope. Gregory Boyle, S.J.: Ma

This is the summer of growing my own produce. And I, in humility, have embraced my role as a random gardener. That is not to say that I didn’t begin with a plan. After all, I scribble lists for everything from plot lines to characters, groceries to poems. But this year, I believed I had drawn up the perfect plan for the garden beds. With the help of my daughter and her incredibly strong husband, we emptied the compost bin of years of accummulated new soil into the existing di

This month, this sunny, shiny, green month of hope and optimism…June always makes me remember all the weddings I’ve attended in this lovely time of year, especially that of my sister, now gone but never forgotten. How young we were, how optimistic, how unfettered by political machinations and AI threats, and age. June also brings a relatively new celebration…PRIDE parades and recognition that not all of us are easily labeled, that some are naturally, organically inclined to d