Blog

I’m grateful for all the youth in our lives these days. Not my youth, of course (which packed up and headed for warmer territory many years ago), but the youth of our many young friends, my sons, and their friends who all color our lives and bring a vibrancy that an...

 I read the blogs of friends who are in the midst of raising families and one friend who blogs (beautifully and deliciously!) about food. I recall my domestic days that seem in the distant past, those moments of making a family feel safe and loved. But now my...

You turn thirty today. How can that be? I hope you feel more joyous about this milestone than I felt on my own thirtieth birthday, heavy with a twin pregnancy, feeling old, old, tired and old and full of dread toward entering another decade.  Today, more...

When my mother died five years ago from throat cancer, we had been estranged for many, many years. For the first time since her death I have been working through our history by writing a memoir about our relationship for my MFA program. As a person of faith, it’s...

I ran away from the church of my youth in my teen years when I failed to see (or hear) a meaningful message behind all the robes, formal prayer and liturgy, which seemed to represent something shallow and dead. I failed to see spiritual and transformed lives...

And so the second year in my MFA begins. I had a brief, very brief, respite from my first year to the beginning of my second year, if you count reading three books, writing a draft of a creative non-fiction manuscript for residency workshops, and reading workshop...

While visiting Kenzie in Macedonia, we had a chance to share a meal with one of his friends who served in the Peace Corps there ten years ago and married a Macedonian woman. For a few years, Jeb and Kristina moved back to the States and lived in Wyoming. But when they...

We found our son. After a long, overnight flight and an interminably long wait for our luggage in the Macedonia airport, we spotted Kenzie waiting outside glass sliding doors behind a roped off area. I paced the airport baggage claim area until our suitcase appeared....

I haven’t seen him in nearly two years. I know parents of military men and women often don’t see their sons and daughters for two years, but this is a first for me since I'm not a military parent. My son is serving with the Peace Corps in Macedonia, teaching English...