Harper: She’s re-reading the Harry Potter series. Some nights, while we are waiting for Hadley to come home from soccer, she’ll read to me and I don’t mind that one bit. Harper says her favorite book in the series is the 7th one. She tells me, with a smile, she loves the battle at Hogwarts when everyone comes together to fight…. View Post

The challenge of Creative Nonfiction is taking the truth that you have, the truth as you know it, and making a story from it. You have to be so fascinated and yet detached from it so that you don’t mind the story the truth becomes. I use the word “detached” because I think in order for a story to have… View Post

My first essay for Coffee+Crumbs was called, “Why I Forgot the Ground Beef,” though I didn’t know I was writing it for C+C. I wrote it for me. I’d just come back from a graduate school residency, where, for 10 days I was reading and writing, and talking about reading and writing, and it was in the grocery store, looking… View Post

Every month, I write a little column for a newsletter that my district sends out. This month’s is called, “The Village Approach.” The Village Approach works like this: I sit down with a student and put a colored card in front of her. If she’s working on letter sounds, she’ll see a letter of the alphabet along with a corresponding… View Post

A friend who knows you before you were a “Mrs.,” before you were a mama, before you used words like “vocation,” and “time management” comes to visit, and it’s not that all these titles and concerns go away, but who you used to be, a laughing girl, a bit of a careless, reckless girl, wakes up. And well, she joins… View Post