Writing and Teaching

"I hate teaching as much as I love teaching, and I love teaching immensely. But who am I to teach writing? 
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Teaching is the first job I actually care — too much? — about.
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“What if you could just show up?” my therapist asked me when I was complaining about the lackadaisical teenagers in a writing course I was teaching.

“What if you didn’t have to teach them anything?”

“What if you could still be learning and teach at the same time?” she asked.
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On the Amtrak back to Hudson, I pull my students’ pages out of my backpack, sip my wine on ice, and escape into the tragic comfort of their unhappy endings. I draw tiny red hearts above the sentences I love."

-Chloe Caldwell, Major Dramatic Question

Burdens and Callings

"I believe in callings. They come as Aces, like the clouds parting, the gift bestowed from above. But I also believe that callings require you to reorient your life and cut away anything extraneous. They are burdens as much as they are gifts."

 Jessa Crisspin book, The Creative Tarot.

Science of Relationships

The second principle of magic:

"Things that have once been in contact with each other
continue to act on each other at a distance even after
the physical contact has been severed."
-James Frazer

Two for Twenty

"I call that trading two for twenty...I'm trading two possibly uncomfortable years for twenty value-driven years."

-Jess Lively

The Price of Life

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

-H.D. Thoreau

Getting Schooled 2015-2016

"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."

-Terry Pratchett

Breathing just a little

"Listen,
are you
breathing just
a little,

and calling it
a life?"

Mary Oliver