Why am I Writing?

Why do people become writers? The question arose during my Creative Nonfiction class at WriterHouse. One of my classmates, a clinical psychologist, said that people work for three reasons: money, career or mission. I wondered if one could work for all three reasons,...

Talent

In a recent blog post, Patrick Ross pondered about talent – inborn perhaps – and skill, working on one’s craft. Why do we marvel at a person’s talent and not their developed skill? Ross wondered as he watched his daughter receive an arts award for the...

God’s Timeline

“Hi, I’m Carole Duff.” I checked in with the two women at the desk outside the Sister Helen Marie Duffy Center where I had taught in-coming Freshman Laptop Camps and faculty workshops. “Oh, yes, we heard that you were coming,” they said. “How long has it been since...

Magical Thinking

The night after the writer John Gregory Dunne died on December 30, 2003, his wife Joan Didion “needed to be alone so that he could come back.” “This was the beginning of my year of magical thinking,” she wrote a few years later. The Year of Magical...