I am someone who likes to feel productive, which is probably why I’ll never really retire. This makes my current aimlessness feel...

I never set out to write children’s fiction. My creative writing pursuits were more commonly centered on nonfiction, the occasional poem,...

NOTE TO PROSPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS: Please be sure to follow the submission guidelines in the PDF below. Thank you! In April 2012 I took my...

April is National Poetry Month, and I feel like celebrating! I haven’t always loved poetry. When I was an undergrad studying English...

I consider myself more an essayist than a poet, but early in 2020 I took a poetry class with Linda Barnes through the Therapeutic Writing...

For those of us who are so inclined, one of the great pleasures of summer is carving out more time to read. I mostly choose my summer...

Whenever I came home from college, where I was studying English literature, my father, Wendall Kinney, would tease me: “What are you...

In the past few weeks my best ideas have come to me while lying on the acupuncture table, my skin bristling with stainless steel needles...

I’ve been rooting around in my workshop notebooks for the past few months looking for material I may want to develop (a practice I highly...

A few weeks ago my husband and I had dinner with friends who asked about the creativity coach training I’m taking with author and...

For the past two and a half years, I have been responding to the writing of incarcerated people from around the United States as a...

Last night I arrived home from a five-day personal writing retreat with a couple of friends at the Highlights Foundation’s retreat center...

Last month, after my mother and I were both fully vaccinated, I flew to Maine to visit her for Mother’s Day. She picked me up in Portland...

The 120-year-old embroidery piece my grandmother created when she was a teen hangs on my office wall. It was a sewing exercise for her to...

“Tell me something I can’t forget.”—Pat Schneider, founder of Amherst Writers & Artists I can’t forget Pat Schneider’s charming yellow...

March is National Reading Month, which I am happy to celebrate since—like most writers—I love to read! My earliest reading memories are...

Everything you go through grows you – Bob Sima, “No Mud, No Lotus” On Monday night I had the honor of hosting a special event to launch...

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it...

It wasn’t Emily Dickinson who put Amherst, Massachusetts on the map for me: it was Pat Schneider. Pat was a gifted poet, author, and...

In early March I offered this video of Maya Angelou reading her poem "Phenomenal Woman" as a writing prompt to celebrate International...