Category: reflection
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What Roses tell us about Growth
My birthday falls on Wednesday, and my rose bush is celebrating with about 50 roses all blooming at the same time. When we bought this house, Mrs. Beauchspies had three rose bushes, one of which my mom trimmed back to hard and killed our first year here. The second always…
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Less Permanent Black Out
Black Out Poetry has made a couple appearances in my life recently, once in R. Diskin Black’s workshop with the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group in late April and once while reading Urvi Thakker’s honors thesis. (Urvi is a senior at Lafayette College, where McKenna Graf is also a member of the Class of 2026. Congrats to…
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Professor of Story Preservation
My life, when reduced to a resume or a curriculum vitae, may appear eclectic, if you’re polite, and chaotic, if you’re not. My professional life has strong themes of journalism and non-profit communications and development, while my academic life has various experiences teaching, mentoring, and researching. I’ve worked in a…
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Learn Who People Are
As a college professor and a mentor, I frequently remind people that when networking, it’s important to ask your connections about themselves, their hobbies, and their general lives. This also applies to working relationships. Organic conversations, the kind that people remember and act on, involve genuine interest in learning who…
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Tips to jumpstart creativity
Tip One: Allow yourself some brain-dead time If you’ve been stressed or in a rut, find something that doesn’t require effort to lean you toward creative productivity. I’m not talking about spending all day on the couch or sleeping until 2 p.m., but watch a favorite movie or one that mirrors…
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Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?
I don’t “doom scroll.” I got my first iPhone in 2009 to settle my anxiety. Everything I could need was in my pocket, accessible by a tiny computer known as the iPhone 3GS. I start my mornings and end my evenings by checking my email, studying dog training videos (as…
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Reflections on My Left Foot
I ended up reading Christy Brown’s My Left Foot this weekend. (The movie stars Daniel Day Lewis. I watched that also.) Christy, born in 1932 as a middle child in an Irish Catholic family of 22 children, had cerebral palsy. The only limb he could control was his left foot— and he even learned to…
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What I’m reading
Not including manuscripts we are publishing, I finished I’m currently reading I’m currently editing
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Life as a working writer
I dedicated myself to my publishing business more seriously when I was laid off in September 2023. I have not worked a full-time job since. In true working writer fashion, I accept freelance writing and editing and journalism assignments, teach college courses when they are available and even serve as…
Parisian Phoenix Publishing 