A Tale of Two Stories
Just for a minute this morning, between the shock of waking too early and the rush of getting ready for the day, in the early bright light of a still…
Shelli is an advocacy writer and creative writing teacher. She loves to spend time with her husband (usually in the garden) and their four almost adult children. She also loves to sew (usually for the local community theater), to read, to write, and to drag her family outside to look at the sky. Shelli is passionate about poetry, Broadway show tunes, and telling stories -- of ourselves, our families, and our communities.
On Getting Lost: Learning to Nurture the Small and Tender Things
The most beautiful thing in the sterile white classrooms where I teach are the students themselves, full of vibrancy and noise and mess, enthusiastic in both their excitement and confusion,…
On Walking in the Rain
It were a foolish and ridiculous arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect thing in this Universe. —Michel De Montaigne. “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” —Henry David…
On Memories, Stories, and Ghosts
It has been years since the old stereo console in my grandmother’s front room worked. Years since anyone even looked at it as anything other than a convenient place to…
A Meditation on Shadows and Light
One of the realities for me of being a writing teacher is that I spend my life reading: reading books, reading craft theory, reading student drafts, reading the work of…
On Not Following the Map
“I don’t think we want to go this way,” I said to my husband as we headed north on the freeway right outside of town. It was fall, and we…
On Teams and Tribes
My youngest son is 17, and right now, in this moment as I write, he is practicing the piano, pounding too loudly at the keys trying to perfect a song…
A Note on Loss
In the last couple of years I have written and received too many condolence letters. And I wonder about them, these artifacts of sorrow and grief, inscribed with a litany…
Looking at the Sky
There is a story my children like to tell, when they are especially annoyed with me, or when there is a new audience, or when they want to remind me…
On Pebbles and Pockets and Things Lost in a Drawer
I was sewing a day or two ago, some simple mending that had been ignored for far too long—stitching a torn hem here and mending a button there, settling into…