My Writing
Our Dance With Leonard
Mark and I were married on a moody August evening in 1997 on the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts. At the end of our ceremony, with the sun setting behind us, we recited the lyrics to the Leonard Cohen song "Dance Me to the End of Love," ending with these lines: Dance me to your beauty with a…
Seeing The World, Not The Wall: Election Lessons From Death Row
A few years ago I profiled death row inmate Damien Echols for a national magazine. After a badly bungled police investigation, Echols, 18 at the time, was sentenced to death for the 1993 murder of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. The harrowing details of Echols’s nearly two-decade long ordeal…
Night Clubbing
I have some pretty strong theories of people who are up at night or too early, strong like a Manhattan on the rocks with Angostura bitters and a dark cherry. We tend to think of ourselves as worriers, as tossers and turners, but that's selling it short, that is ignoring the depths of our night…
The Lonely Darkness vs. The Dark Alone
Here's my most recent post on the Brevity Blog for writers. A great place to visit in the middle of the night. Who better than a sleepless writer to explain the distinction between the Lonely Darkness and the Dark Alone? Allow me, if you will. The Lonely Darkness is tossing in bed until your…
Who's in?
My son's favorite teacher has been in the audition process for real Jeopardy, and it's a bid deal. You have to be fast and smart and alert and normal and a little quirky and, yeah, that's not what we're talking about here. The fantastic news with Insomnia Jeopardy is that anyone can play!!…
Midnight Treasure
On the mornings like today when I'm too under slept to write, I slip on my boots, throw a coat over my pajamas, and wander down the Minuteman Bike Path behind my house. With only the light of the moon to guide me, I look for things, lost or dropped, twinkly or bright. I'm not above picking up…
Late Night Friends
I mostly love the Dark Alone of 5am when I've had enough sleep (read: 5-6 hours) and I can tiptoe downstairs to brew my coffee and stir together some words in the silence. But there are those mornings when a writer needs company, and that, my fellow insomniacs, is what a corn snake is for. Meet…
It's 2:10am. Do you know where your blog is?
There's a lot you can do in the middle of the night, and I've been doing it for decades. You can worry about death or your in-grown toenail. You can hate on your husband for having the audacity to not only sleep deeply but to salt the wound by snoring, or you can read your Kindle Paperwhite for a…