I keep on plugging away at classical guitar, resurrecting this discipline I haven’t studied in so many long years. I’ve more or less worked my way through the book that was my introduction to playing, compiled and composed by one Christopher Parkening, and have moved on to some slightly more intermediate-level exercises and pieces. This … Continue reading Talent—or Time? Searching for the Special Sauce
writing
Afternoon Miniature 9.7.20
Cecily could still hear the little fan whirring, a sound that somehow underscored the silence that morning, if she thought long and hard enough about it. For all but the coldest months in the last year, Claudia had kept it going on a small fern stand next to her reading chair, more or less in … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 9.7.20
Afternoon Miniature 8.2.20
It was twilight and Cecily’s bones ached. She stepped off the city bus and began the short walk to the home she shared with her mother, whose health had spiraled into a steady decline in the last year or so. She turned the key in the front door lockset and stepped inside quietly to the … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 8.2.20
Afternoon Miniature 7.19.20
Bran’s bedroom was all that remained to suggest the original vernacular architecture of her little cottage—the rest she had dragged grudgingly into the 1970s. A pair of authentic-looking casement windows just above the bed had convinced Lucy this might be true, anyway: They were large and lacked mullions, with handwrought iron fasteners that worked surprisingly … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 7.19.20
Surviving a Pandemic: Got a Plan B?
Knoxville Ballet School In 2006 I launched Knoxville Ballet School with the goal of bringing classical instruction in its purest form to a city of roughly a half million—unrelenting quality in that singular discipline, and nothing else, would be the thing to distinguish what I was peddling from what other schools in the area offered, … Continue reading Surviving a Pandemic: Got a Plan B?
Use Descriptive Writing to Improve All Your Writing
This week I'm publishing a little piece over on LinkedIn about how mastering descriptive writing makes you a better writer overall; just follow the link.
Afternoon Miniature 6.14.20
Lucy leaned over the sink to bring her face closer to the mirror, the better to apply her shimmering pink lipstick. Tiny wrinkles had started to come at the outside corners of her eyes, only just, but added more interest than age to her face. Earlier she’d swept her ebony hair into a French twist, … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 6.14.20
Frozen Moments: A Memory
Impressionist-like landscape Leaving work last Friday afternoon, and even a couple of moments earlier in the week, I paused to drink in the landscape around our office campus, so eerily quiet just now. It always possesses a bucolic beauty, even on the bleakest winter days. But at some point when I was too preoccupied with … Continue reading Frozen Moments: A Memory
Afternoon Miniature 3.15.20
Lucy lay sprawled on the floor of the capacious family room absorbed in her artwork, drawing on an enormous white tablet with a collection of graphite pencils scattered about, and the tin that held them at her elbow. She rubbed lines here and there with the outside edge of her hand to soften them, the … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 3.15.20
Fresh Fiction: Monday Afternoon Miniature
However pointless Cessily deemed fussing over an empty house, mopping and dusting rooms missing their people, making and remaking already made up beds, she remained as grateful for the work. She could hear her elder coworkers in the butler’s pantry, a man and woman in servitude to this family long before Cessily arrived there. On … Continue reading Fresh Fiction: Monday Afternoon Miniature
