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...

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...

What’s in a title?: examining the title of First They Killed My Father

Content warning: this post contains discussion of genocide and associated acts of violence, in the context of a literary analysis. The week has been packed. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I led student orientation workshops on diversity, introducing ideas of social identities, individual differences, and how assumptions arise when we meet people different from ourselves. The...

Back to school, seeking balance

I could not believe how hard it was to wake up early again after the summer! My alarm whined like a hungry dog. I stumbled up, tightened the muscles in my legs to stop the lightheadedness, managed to gather phone and sweater and water cup. I set the water boiling for tea. I made it...

Can reading literature change our beliefs?

I remember a fable I heard once, from some origin that I can no longer locate. I think I was told this story by a speaking voice, perhaps by a teacher at school, perhaps elsewhere. The situation of its telling has thus vanished, but I remember the story perfectly. Let me share it with you...

Niches: what are we really blogging about?

Words like Trees began two and a half years ago, December of 2018, as a way to build some kind of an online presence for myself and for my writing. I was planning at that time to be applying to MFA programs in the near future, and I was focused on the science-fiction novel I...

Writing in Wilderness

In the north of Minnesota, lakes patchwork the great conifer-birch forest. Land lies flat to the water like it might buckle and sink down, and sphagnum bogs pull the water up and inland, drowning trees and leaving old gray skeletons. Water insects ride the surface tension in great swarms, dotting it like rain does, to...

Gone canoeing

I am writing this post early, on Thursday, July 15. When it posts early Sunday morning, I'll be in a tent in northern Minnesota, hopefully sleeping soundly. This trip with my dad and father-in-law was meant to happen last summer, but Covid restrictions postponed our plans a year. Now we are sorting through our final...

Familiar Territory

My parents moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin just a few weeks before my husband and I moved to Norway. My childhood home was thus relocated four hours to the east, the base I return to now a place I have never lived. But people make places what they are, and my parents’ presence and the...