I've been melancholy lately, realizing again how short life can be.A friend of mine passed away suddenly. I got the call last Wednesday night and I sunk into the booth at work, feeling like this wasn't real. It was an out-of-body experience. I heard the words, and they made logical sense, but it was hard... Continue Reading →
positive review
There is no greater compliment than being told my writing is something worthwhile. Writing is the one skill I have, this craft I have spent more time on than anything else. It is what I'm passionate about, what I can't imagine life without. I still remember once when I was a kid and my dad... Continue Reading →
my void, my aloneness, my self
At any rate, that’s how I started running. Thirty three—that’s how old I was then. Still young enough, though no longer a young man. The age that Jesus Christ died. The age that Scott Fitzgerald started to go downhill. That age may be a crossroads in life. That was the age when I began my... Continue Reading →
trying
January 2017 has been the most productive month of my life. When I started this MFA program, someone warned me, "don't expect to finish your novel in a semester. But maybe over the course of the whole program."I nodded. Of course I didn't expect to complete my whole novel in a semester! I have two... Continue Reading →
not so lone dreamer
To be in this place full of writers, this literary community, is what I have craved since graduating college. Eleven years it took to weave my way through a labyrinth of what wasn't me to return to where I started: writing and sharing with other literary people, other people whose lives revolve around something other than... Continue Reading →
small efforts
So much in the habit of sewing something I stitch up a bunch of scraps, try to see what I can make. ~from "The Color Purple" by Alice WalkerI don't watch a lot of TV, but one of the few shows I do watch is Project Runway. I watch it while I run on the treadmill,... Continue Reading →
pause
Today is deadline day and I need to finish this short story and my cover letter and send off this packet to be critiqued. But I read something that made me pause. And I thought, I should put this on my blog. Because once upon a time I planned on this blog being a place... Continue Reading →
distance
One day, I hope to write a memoir about being a birth mother. One day, when I have enough narrative distance and perspective, if that day ever comes for me. In the mean time though, I blog occasionally about it, when I can find a way to shape words into something like what I feel.I... Continue Reading →
write on
Before starting school, I wasn't sure what I was in for. I am in a low-residency MFA program, which means that we meet for a 10-day conference once a semester. The rest of my work is done independently from home, with no classroom time. I have never so much as taken an online course and... Continue Reading →
statement of purpose
I have been going through a bit of a mid-life crisis (people have corrected me and called it a third-life-crisis, but really, how could we know?). Staying home for the past two years has been a nice sabbatical from full-time work, but in the back of my mind, I've always known I would go back,... Continue Reading →
holly pelesky 