This has been an experience. Of course, the nerd in me got all giddy and googley eyed when I thought about going back to school for the summer.  I was making lists and filling up my planner before I’d even gotten accepted into the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Project’s Invitational Summer Institute.  (Just typing that long title […]

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365 days make a year. A year ago. It’s hard to believe that I was sitting there, alone in that airport a year ago. But I was. It seems like eons and yesterday all at once.  I can still conjure up the smell of rich, Colombian coffee with ease and although my Spanish has more […]

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It had been nineteen glorious days of adventure and snacks and plans that failed.  The three girls from Rice Hall, 6th floor had managed to survive a bound-for-vomit snorkeling trip and a lunch buffet of fried alligator and mystery meats of other origins on what should have been Granny’s Christmas table. They stood there in […]

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The new highway came through Gran’s homeplace the first time in the 60s.  The hayfield out front was bisected by two lanes of asphalt and cattle ambling were replaced by Mr. Ford’s moneymakers “driving like bats flyin’ die-rectly outta hell” as Gran says. Thirty years later two lanes turned to four and twenty acres were […]

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We are head strong and gentle.  Loving and crude. We are courageous and meek.  Beautiful and scorned. We are temperamental and stoic And a river meandering through a shaded place. We are reckless abandon and silliness A flower bursting with pack-of-Skittles blooms. We are mushy in the middle places and hard around the heart. Calloused […]

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So, I’m in this writing workshop.  And it has been proven to me– over and over again– that I’m not nearly as smart as I thought I was. Grammar and language and mechanics have always been things that I just knew.  I couldn’t name parts of speech or figures of speech or diagram a sentence […]

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“If there’s a thug within a hundred mile radius, you’re gonna date him,” Daddy told me late that afternoon.  I tried to pretend like he wasn’t right, but I knew better. Daddy was always right. He was an about-to-be Marine– tall and handsome with hands as big as nighttime.  Not Daddy, the thug,  I mean.  […]

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Nimbly she played. Quietly she sang. Songs of river stones. Stories of time. The sounds echoed through the forest in their gentle way, each sweet trill leading him. Toward her. As she played. Songs of river stones. Stories of time. Until the boy was there beside the moving water.  Awestruck and frozen in his wonder. […]

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Somehow I managed to weasel myself into this invitational summer writing institute.  I’m in no way, form, or fashion of the intellectual capacity to be a member of this elite group, but I’m BSing with the best of ’em. My momma would be so proud. Still, the institute has embedded within my day a time […]

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Writing is one of those things that takes momentum.  And time. At least for me it does. Honestly, I haven’t had much of either lately– I’ve been sort of stagnant.  Stuck.  Like water pooled in the low-lying corner of my daddy’s shop. But just so you know, I’m fighting tooth and nail to get them […]

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