Writing Outside Our Own Identities: Representation, Research, Sensitivity Reading, and Justice–#AuthorToolboxBlogHop

This post is part of the monthly Author Toolbox Blog Hop. Check out other Hop participants' posts to learn about more aspects of writing craft and business, the third Wednesday of each month except for November and December. If we are writers who care about social justice, we have to interrogate our work. How do...

A few pictures for the start of winter

Typically the snow here doesn't stay. It falls, it melts, maybe in January and February we will have a few weeks of solid snow. This year, it's come early. In the first days of December, we had our first dusting, followed in the night with enough snow to cover up the grass, to make it...

Trying for gratitude in a challenging time

We managed to find a turkey this year for our school's Thanksgiving celebration. Turkeys are not common here in Norway--last year we had the school celebration earlier, and not until a few weeks afterward did we find a turkey in the shop. We made three very cute roast chickens instead. This year, we found a...

Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

The last few weeks, my bedtime reading has been another novel I found in the marvelous book storage room at school: Untouchable, published in 1935. It was Mulk Raj Anand's debut novel, written in English, and it marked the beginning of Anand's use of literature to argue against the British colonial presence in India as...

Take a break before revising

Sometimes in my writing journey these last several years, I have taken issue with old writing advice--the mandate to show, don't tell; the focus on active verbs that overshadows the great work other verbs do; Western literature's myopic focus on conflict--these are all pieces of inherited writing wisdom that, with deeper thought on my own...

Making a story feel real: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea

In 1966, the Dominican writer Jean Rhys published her most celebrated work, the novella Wide Sargasso Sea. It marked her return to the literary scene after a near twenty-year's gap, and it inspired a large body of scholarship and study. Wide Sargasso Sea took as its focus the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's...

The Best Writing is Good Rewriting

Moving from the first to the second to the umpteenth draft is a slow and winding process. Sometimes we love it, seeing our writing transform, clearing away the debris of extra words, shifting our ideas into a clearer order--sometimes we hate it, when we're tinkering, perfectionizing, wondering if the changes we persist at make any...

Books as physical objects

I'm an e-reader lover--the convenience of travel, the ready availability of English books when living in rural Norway, their searchability, the ability to convert my own writing into e-book format for a more authentic read-through--there are many things I love about these devices. But of course, the book as a physical object is not to...

Rainy days

After a glitteringly beautiful August, the rainy days have come. Bands of mist hang against the sides of the mountains, and the colors have muted themselves, clamped closer together in the wet. Sometimes I feel confused about rain. There is of course beauty in rainy days. Particular things, like the water clinging to grass blades,...

More on the power of studying together: Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father

I worried I was making the wrong choice with books this school year. I worried the book was too long, that the students wouldn't read, and I worried that there was not enough depth of language to warrant the kind of study we needed. But I kept coming back to First They Killed My Father--I...

Making Paneer

For years, we have been planning a dinner with colleagues. The idea first arose two or three years ago--my husband and I are hobby cheesemakers, and two of our colleague-friends come from India and make delicious food. When we mentioned once that we had made paneer over the weekend, our colleague hatched the plan: you...