For a writer, writing about your parents can be one of the hardest and most rewarding things to do. You may come to understand someone who is part of your life in a way that you have not been able to before. For Kao Kalia Yang, who writes about her father in The Song Poet, it is a way to understand his art in a way she has not before.
If you are weary of coronavirus news and you are stuck at home, there is one bit of good news. March 19 marks the first day in spring. Here are five things you can do now that it’s spring even if you are stuck at home.
Today is International Women’s Day and the theme this year is #EqualforEach. That means a gender equal world in the boardroom, government, and the media. That also means the books we read.
When my husband and I planned our vacation to Laos and Cambodia for the first couple weeks of February, we weren’t thinking about Valentine’s Day. We barely celebrate it when we’re at home and weren’t expecting to think much about it while traveling. Vacation is special enough, who needs to plan a special night?
I returned from a 10-day trip to Laos and Cambodia almost a week ago. I had such an amazing time and I intend to write about in great detail some day. But I am still so tired today. So, instead I’ve decided to take Natalie Goldberg’s advice and write you a few postcards instead.
The sun was shining brightly but then. Does that sound like the beginning of a beautiful story? Or the end of a beautiful day? It depends if you see the sky partly sunny or partly cloudy.
When my sense of smell began to fade I knew why. I had been bold enough to tempt fate years before. Once, a long time ago, before I knew anything, I played a game with a friend. We were imagining things we thought would never happen. I asked, “If you had to lose a sense, which would you choose?”
Today I’m writing about nothing. I feel as if I have nothing to say. But it’s time to write this blog, so here are a few meditations on the meaning of nothing.
For someone who writes, I do not have beautiful handwriting. I don’t think anyone would read my writing if I had to write longhand. I don’t think anyone could. My husband routinely asks for translations of the grocery list. Once I was brave enough to read my own journals and I had a hard time deciphering much of what I wrote.
Perhaps that’s why Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate by Carolyn Porter was so interesting to me. The story begins with the letters she found in an antique store and bought because of the beauty of the script. She planned to someday design a font and thought the letters and their beautiful form may be the basis for it. They were in French, so she couldn’t read them.
As a lot of people do this time of year, I was thinking about resolutions. I don’t really believe in setting New Year’s resolutions. Usually, when I want to change something about myself, I just start when I think of it. I don’t necessarily think you have to wait for the calendar to turn to make a change.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t think about change at the beginning of a new year. I am a planner by heart and like everyone else, I like to think about what the next 365 days will bring. As a writer, usually it starts with words. But since I’m not a fortune teller, what those words will be are anyone’s guess.
