I had this dream. It was one of those cinematic dreams that has nothing to do with your waking life. It even had the movie trailer voice over guy. So I woke up and the characters had names and I had seen whole scenes between them. Not being one to snub a muse because she doesn't let me check my palm pilot before scheduling a visit, I started working on it. I'm plowing through a "brain barf" rough draft. I'll rearrange it in a sensible order later. Because it's not coming out in a tidy chronol...

I remember being a little girl--seven years old. A cold gray afternoon--I don't remember any leaves on the trees--I was walking past St. Mary's church. A little, blue, iron mailbox on a cement post stood across the street. My mother had probably sent me to mail a letter. I looked up at the church, the steeple with its star-bursting cross, its stained glass , its white plaster statue of Mary whose sweet face and outstretched arms were poised to embrace all who came near. The mystic aura of the...

Amid the lesson plans and curriculum maps and bureaucratic hoops, amid the constant round of homemaking and mothering, amid the demands for money that I don't have, I've gotten a little crazy. I still miss Wisconsin and I keep referring to it as "back home". I got an irrepressible urge (almost a call) to write along with a numbing case of writer's block. So I wrote my Dad a letter. I talk to my mom on the phone, and Dad is always on the extension. He just can't get a word in edgewise. So if I...

I just received an e-mail that my piece Children of the Night is being published in a trade paperback anthology of work by mothers with special needs children. I am doing the boogie dance in my jammies.

These are not necessarily from books I liked...some I did, some I didn't, some I didn't even finish. But is is a fun exercise to go through your book shelf and pull out ten good first sentences. 1. “You see, Pooh,” I said, “a lot of people don’t seem to know what Taoism is…”—Benjamin Hoff. The Tao of Pooh. 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.—Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. 3. No one who had ever seen ...

She became her mother against her own will. The words she swore she would never say to her own children spilled out of her mouth. And the children's response was like a slap, "You sounded like Grandma just now." NO! Make it stop! She listed all the things she did that her mother would NEVER do: Fast dance in the kitchen Drop everything for a lunar eclipse. Offer the UPS man a cup of cocoa. Let people come over even when the house was messy. Do Tarzan yells at the beach. Go to t...

Electronic hasps divide day from night. Impossibly pink and patronizing. The receptionist assures me that nothing is out of the ordinary. She doesn’t have the black eye and the welt. I sit in the mock living room till I can go back. The pallid man with a widow’s peak and prominent cuspids tells me he has again lost his job and his apartment and asks how I’m doing. Dear God, tell me that wasn’t some kind of pick-up line. “No ring, I see.” (Eew, it was.) “What monster gave you that...