Category: reflection
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Reflections on Dr Seuss
For most of my life, Green Eggs and Ham was my favorite book. I brought it home from the school library so many times that my mother would groan, “Oh, no. Not Green Eggs and Ham again.” And when I grew up, I bought myself a copy in French— and as a university student…
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Thoughts on Characters (and The Gilmore Girls)
I recently gave a free workshop on Building Memorable Characters at Easton Area Public Library. We have two more workshops scheduled at the library: Thursday, March 13: Publishing Basics Thursday, April 10: Poetry in Everyday Life with McKenna Graf, Darrell Parry & Nancy Scott At our workshop last night, we talked about types of characters and how…
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On preparing your book for publication
As a publisher, I often interact with people that have self-published a book or sometimes I also sometimes hear from authors that they have already published their book while I had it on my “to be read” pile. As president of the writers group, I interact with people that made…
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Meanwhile at Mary Meuser Library
While I offer workshops at the Easton Area Public Library, I serve on the board of trustees for my local public library, the Mary Meuser Memorial Library in quaint Wilson Borough, Pa., which shares a zip code with neighboring Easton. I first joined the library board circa 2008 when my now-college-aged child…
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More poetry, more history
Recently, in my Substack newsletter, I mentioned how my grandfather served on the Queen Mary during World War II and how this led to his meeting and marrying my grandmother. I mentioned this because I was reading Jane Friedman’s hot sheet and saw she would be presenting at a writing…
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While in Yemen…
If you saw my post yesterday, I talked about my travels in Tunisia, Yemen and Somalia. In Yemen, I had tea at one of the “coffee houses” in the suq. I originally lingered outside because women in Yemen do not frequent the same social spaces as men, but as a traveler/guest, I was invited…
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Why I don’t share my opinions on some topics
As a journalist, I learned to observe. I learned to listen and treat different people with different opinions the same and then evaluate what they told me via more sources and research. What I thought, what I felt, nobody cares about that. A journalist— a good journalist— seeks “truth” and serves…
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Year of the Sandwich
New Year. Plotting goals. Absorbing information and moving forward. I have proclaimed 2025 “THE YEAR OF THE SANDWICH.” Maybe I’m just hungry. But as I discussed in my goal setting for writers workshop this week, a sandwich offers a pretty good mental image of individual goal setting. We choose the…
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Inspiration at Your Fingertips
There is so much inspiration available on the Substack platform. On the same day of my last newsletter, Amy Suto sent out a newsletter offering a list of ways you could earn $100,000 as a writer in 2025, see that list here. And somehow I ended up perusing Austin Kleon’s posts about notebooks, taste some of…
Parisian Phoenix Publishing 