I walk the little social trail past the skeleton of a fallen Ponderosa and the big hollowed stump of what must have been an Old Growth tree.

You, of course, are the shape of the container that holds your stories. But, what are you?

What if you couldn’t bear being inside four walls another second?

Scheherezade was a shadow against shadows.

lacuna: noun (pl. lacunae |-nī, -nē| or lacunas): an unfilled space or interval; a gap: the journal has filled a lacuna in Middle Eastern studies.

You may be mystified by the way you can be joyfully writing, then find yourself without words.

Take refuge. For now. Imagine your writing as a shawl, a cape, a beat-up hoodie.

So it went, with safety, the more you guarded, the less you had.

—Richard Powers

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. —Neil Gaiman

You don’t begin. You begin and stop. You don’t resume. You believe that without directions, you are lost.

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.” - Jerry Seinfeld

You – and I am not using the tedious contemporary convention of writing in Second Person – you find yourself in a guest bedroom . . .

Look down at your hands. A simple instruction. Now close your eyes and . . .

I find myself muttering the words I often challenge when my students say or write them: “What is the point of writing?”

If you are hoping for a surprise, you will be disappointed.

Dreams heed no borders, the eyes need no visas. With eyes shut I walk across the line in time. All the time. —Gulzar, poet, lyricist, and film director (b. 18 Aug 1934)