Columns

Then one night I heard her remark, quite casually in the bath, ”I’m a bad kid.” I felt like someone had poured a bucket of ice water over my head.…

”Well, clearly I’m not needed here, ” I said to Marc, shoving on my shoes. I felt like my own child’s temporary babysitter, just waiting for the real parent to…

Having written the Senior Mama column here for the past two years, I’ve decided to take advantage of my position as Wise Older Woman to offer some writing encouragement for…

In Class 5 of Birthing the Mother Writer, Cassie invites readers to submit a book review of one of the six nonfiction books she’s suggested, or else one of their…

I might have a little touch of the fever. It’s not just the puppies. Inside Starbucks, there’s a three-month-old baby gurgling inside her car seat while her mother waits in…

Home. That small, one-syllable word carries a huge amount of weight. How much of what we call home has to do with location, and how much is about the people…

In last month’s “Birthing the Mother Writer” class, we were introduced to dialogue in fiction as a way of keeping the plot and narrative “rolling,” while also revealing the hidden…

I left Peñasco and returned to my classes, fell in love, married, moved away, but never quite forgot the women of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, who passed their healing…

Love should come, I thought, like breathing, like a beating heart: effortlessly. But it did not come effortlessly, and I felt so guilty. Guilty and terrified.

In Class 4 of Birthing the Mother Writer, Cassie invites readers to submit a short story of 700-1000 words that shows an adept use of dialogue.

In last month’s column, Cassie Premo Steele asked readers to submit short stories that demonstrate the principles of narrative timing and scene making. Here’s the story Cassie chose, along with…