Hemingway Done Wrong

Fate brought me to Ernest Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. We had gone to a new library in the metro area to fill up a Sunday afternoon. Even though the library looked impressive from the outside, it had the smallest spattering of fiction I've seen - only about 50 titles per alphabet letter. Thankfully, one…

Writing Aloud: 1.5 Year Update

Hi there! If you've been with me since the beginning of this blog, you know that my first post was about growing as a more creative writer from my technical roots. I aimed to write about what I read with the vague hope of improving. I was recently on a podcast about the writing process…

They Hadn’t Heard Us Calling

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides has a straightforward plot: five teenage sisters in a Detroit suburb commit suicide in one year. But what makes it a captivating story instead of just an awful string of events is how it's narrated. Eugenides tells the story through a group of neighborhood boys. The boys are men now,…

Daring to Grow Together

I’m almost a decade late in reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly. Thankfully, it is just as applicable (if not more) in 2023 as when it was published in 2015. Here’s the quote from Theodore Roosevelt that Brown uses for the premise of her book: It is not the critic that counts; not the man who…

Playing Dolls with Nora Roberts

Last summer, I was inspired by Sandra Bullock’s character in The Lost City to add romance novels to my reading list. My first ever romance novel, The Bride Test by Helen Hoang, was a fun read with surprising heft—covering neurodivergence and immigration in addition to misadventures like finding yourself naked in a closet with your…

O’Connor Rewrites O. Henry

I borrowed Flannery O’Connor’s Everything that Rises Must Converge to be a light read after finishing a book on trauma. I remembered studying her “Gift of the Magi” story in a high school English class—jotting down the foreshadowing, plot, and themes into little boxes on a worksheet. A couple sacrifices their greatest treasures to give…

Learning to Metabolize Pain

Resmaa Menakem’s grandmother’s hands were deformed and hardened from her childhood picking cotton in the deep south. Menakem uses this metaphor to illustrate the damage caused by racism in American society on our physical bodies and minds in his book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. This…

Happy-Sad Like Sour Skittles

In Greece, they have a word for feeling happy and sad at the same time: charmolypi. It’s the idea that joy can exist in sorrow and vice versa. For example, your heart can be full of love (joy), but at the same time, you may know it will not last (sorrow). I read about this…

David Sedaris & the Anti-Hustle Lifestyle

I spend too much time on LinkedIn. Yes, I need to be there as a freelance writer, putting myself out there and talking with prospective clients. But I can also fall into a mindless scroll when my caffeine-o-meter is down or when putting off a tedious assignment. Many popular posts on LinkedIn encourage hustling: “Morning…

Roots & Reflections

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is a massive work that is simultaneously heartbreaking and hilarious. She offers so much fodder for blogging—the myth of homeland, how to write with half a dozen different accents, everyday absurdities, and the many potential origins of the book’s title. Above all, though, Smith writes about roots and reflections—how where we…