My Blog

We find ourselves in unprecedented times with daunting challenges. I hear so many creatives complain of a dullness, of doubt, of waning motivation under the weight of all the trouble in the world. This morning, after an unproductive hour at my desk, I made the mistake...

October 2022 The creative life We all get stuck, blocked. Usually because we've opened the door to doubt. Many of us wrestle with the challenges that our current tumultuous time imposes on our creative process. If you find yourself stuck, easily distracted, here's...

I hear from so many of you about your struggles around writing under the weight of the world in this moment of conflict, confusion, Covid, and false narratives. Life is challenging enough without this moment adding gravity to every decision, action, and intention....

Summer 2020 “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”               ~ Audre Lorde Yet again  ...

The cold and brutal murder of George Lloyd, a president tweeting hate, a lurking coronavirus, anarchists polluting peaceful protests, have pulled the rug out from under all of us. I met Amy Cooper, a one woman lesson on the exploitation of racism, in what I read as a...

We've survived power outages, earthquakes, devil winds, fire, smoke-filled air, and the violence of news--for the time being! I'm grateful for our writer's coping gifts: books, fictional worlds, moving essays, poetry,  pen, paper, computers,...

"Some students benefit from one-on-one or small-group instruction, perhaps like that offered by Teresa Burns Gunther and her Lakeshore Writers. Gunther’s workshops provide writers a chance to work in-depth on manuscripts in progress – fiction and memoir, novel, and...

Dear Teresa,I recently returned from a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center, where I wrote like crazy in a fall, bountiful in the colors of change, into winter's first snow that dressed the encircling mountains in white. At VSC, I felt...

I  recently returned from a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center, where I wrote like crazy in a fall painted all the colors of change and into winter's first snow that dressed the encircling mountains in white. At VSC, I felt alive, far from the news of the...

I hope that the holidays brought you comfort, time for politics to recede, space to escape into stories and poems that inspire, and to write. Since the election, many of you have confided your struggles to get to the page; that your story or novel feels unnecessary or...