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?
writing
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
Sunday Journal Entry: Staying True to Intentions
Sunday, February 9th, 2020, and we’ve settled into mid-winter in Vermont, the moment when Christmas 2019 is already a distant memory, but the first tender shoots poking up through the earth are still weeks or even months away, never mind the vernal equinox: We’re on our own time up here. Somebody warned me about long … Continue reading Sunday Journal Entry: Staying True to Intentions
Fresh Fiction: Sunday Afternoon Miniature
The familiar smell of wax served only to underscore the injustice of the situation: However firmly the child attempted to clutch a crayon between her tiny thumb and the two fingers next to it, her painfully swollen metacarpals, their distal joints no longer even discernible through the swelling, protested loudly, and her elbow wailed in … Continue reading Fresh Fiction: Sunday Afternoon Miniature
Journal Entry: A Holiday Reflection
Today is my last ‘official’ day off in a week with a couple of holidays plunked smack into the middle of it, courtesy of our Gregorian calendar. I exercised a little opportunism, nudging some unclaimed vacation time around what was already coming, like a pair of bookends. There is still the weekend ahead, which will … Continue reading Journal Entry: A Holiday Reflection
Morning Miniature 12.7.19
Cessily stood resolute on the bluff, arms folded and her brows stitched together above a pair of angry green eyes that favored her mother’s; the pinafore she wore over her dress billowed a little in the breeze, which was not strong enough to carry aloft her self-pity. Inside the house she could hear her brother … Continue reading Morning Miniature 12.7.19
