Category: Creativity

On making lists, stirring creativity and finding direction in these times

7/5/2026

MAKE A LIST when you’re lost and it’ll guide you back to the point of things, to steer yourself in a direction meant to delight you. When I walk our dog, I often ask him, “Which way, which way?” And sometimes he’ll pause and ponder the question, but just for a moment, before he makes his move, a gut reaction, a way forward—he knows where to go and he leads me. What a good boy.

When I say make a list, I mean a list taken from the pages of the Surrealists’ handbook. I got the idea from an ex-boyfriend who worked as a photographer when I met him. We used to teach together in public schools, create curricula for youth centered on creativity and collaboration. He’d always make what he called a “shot list” for our students—a list of assignments that were open-ended enough to yield a wild array of results.

"Take a photo that bends light." "Take a photo that talks to the color green." Take a photo that made a decision."

When my current love, a musician, told me he was feeling lost and uninspired by his process, always following the same formula and feelings to create his albums, I suggested a “sound list.” Make a list of directions you could take a song and follow it, however you interpret the assignment.

He was game, so I made him a list:

Make a song that feels like clouds
Make a song that reminds you of trees
Make a song that sounds like your childhood
Make a song that asks too many questions
Make a song that melts in the heat
Make a song that loves to look at itself in the mirror
Make a song that sounds like a date with god
Make a song that a dog would love
Make a song that makes me cry
Make a song that travels only at night

I asked him how it was going the other day—with the sound list—he told me it was going well, that it had him pondering the shape and feel of clouds, that he was working with the ethereal and transient nature of those fluffy beings floating overhead. I told him it didn’t have to be so literal—that’s always a playful tension between us, me, the poet, him, the realist—but in all fairness, he got it, and he’s working on a song about clouds now, when just weeks before, the sky was dark.

I make all kinds of lists—it makes for a great poetry assignment as well—I used to ask my students all the time to make lists as poetic transmission. Make a list, I’d say, of things that go up, or things that go down. Things that move and things that remain still. Things you love and things you hate. Lists of places and faces, hatreds and favorites, lists of to-dos and to-don’ts. I got the idea from a book on teaching poetry to kids, when I was sure I’d be teaching poetry forever.

So I never made a list of other jobs I might have in a lifetime. Memory merchant. Nostalgia Dealer. Story Bender. Resident Director. Writing Consultant. Sentence Healer. Book Surgeon. Paragraph Peddler. Futurist Fawner. Instagram Ideologue. TikTok Talker. What else, what else may I be in this lifetime, at fifty, as women confess in quite a mess that they can’t find work for the life of them?

Make a list, I say.

A song list, a shot list, a poem list, a job list. A list of options and plans should the shit hit the fan, should the end and the beginning crash into such a chaotic flash we’ll all be stunned by its beauty! I know I could probably sell my chocolate chip cookies, famous just to my family members, but if the world only knew, if they knew! I could go door-to-door to floor my neighbors with their deliciousness.

My list will not include listlessness or listening, to be fair. I thought about going back to school to train as a therapist, but I think I’d make a better trapeze artist than deep listener, because I know at some point, I’d always want to interrupt and talk to them about the beauty of lists to make it all better. And no one wants to pay a therapist for quick solutions to their long list of life’s problems!

I can’t wait to hear my sweetheart’s cloud songs. And after that, a song about trees. My list for him is quite selfish, if I’m honest, it’s a list of sounds I want to hear as the soundtrack to these strange days and nights. I’m especially excited to hear what he does with that one about god—or that one about the song that loves to look at itself in the mirror—or that one song that only travels at night.

I don’t mean to congratulate myself, but I must admit the list as remedy is as good as any for these difficult and disturbing days. How the world keeps collapsing in on itself with words that no longer hold their meanings, how we in the world keep on walking through it, no longer certain of the ground beneath our feet—wobbly, wooly, woeful, wistful, a list of words that start with a letter of your choice, make it now, you’ll reach the letter Z and begin again with A.

Love you.

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On teaching again and the jitters and jazziness of trying something new

6/18/2026

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MY HEART is full of gratitude after the first workshop in my summer writing series, Slow Savor! This was a dream come true, to organize an online writing series with likeminded folks interested in generative writing sessions—to stir creativity in community!

I have teaching roots—my dad was an English teacher—I remember grading his students’ papers at the kitchen table when I was just ten years old! Can you imagine? I read his students’ essays and noted in red ink where they could elaborate or clarify. How absurd that my father trusted me to do this—I guess he needed assistance—but I often trace my teaching desires back to those nights at the kitchen table.

When I was little, I set up a school in the basement for my sister as my sole student. Later, I taught for many years in public schools—as an English teacher, and then as a visiting poet, a teaching artist, a professional development facilitator—but at some point I got burnt out by the work and the conversations that surrounded it. I remember feeling like we all kept saying and insisting on the same concepts and ideas, rarely moving the needle on our collective understanding of teaching or learning when it came to creative writing and the arts in general.

So my heart grew restless. I also started to doubt myself as a writer. It was around this time that my heart started tilting toward the Swahili Coast. I’d gone to Tanzania as a teaching artist and by the time my six weeks were up with the theater project, I’d already decided that if I could stay in that part of the world, I would do everything in my power to make it happen. A few months later, I packed up my life in Chicago and off I went to learn Swahili.

I was lucky to find work in a teaching-adjacent role at the local university as a resident director, hosting American students on language studies programs in Zanzibar. But I stopped teaching directly with students around that time, and of course, I started to miss it. I organized a monthly poetry series in town; I led poetry workshops at the embassy library on campus; I tried to stir up poetry and writing projects in collaborations of various kinds.

But essentially, I would stop teaching, at least in the classic sense, for many years. I drifted into a newsroom and then into a magazine, where my days were spent more on editorial workflows and calendars than curricula building and students’ work. I remembered fondly how I used to lug around my students’ poetry wherever I went in my car, reading and organize it, editing and publishing it. Those days were behind me, and I started to feel distanced from it.

After a while, for obvious reasons, I became totally disillusioned by the news and digital media in general. I wondered why and how I’d strayed so far away from my teaching roots—I used to love curriculum talk and building worlds with others through the arts—what was I doing now?

Last June, an unexpected invitation to New Mexico reacquainted me with my teaching self—I was asked to lead a weeklong creative nonfiction writing seminar as part of a larger anthropology collaboration with the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. At first, I felt a bit like an imposter—who, me? Yes, you, was the reply. I am grateful for a colleague who trusted me to lead and teach a series of workshops on the fine art of creative nonfiction writing for academics.

And I LOVED it. The experience totally energized me and reoriented me in the direction of teaching and learning. I still stumble sometimes to reconcile the past me with the present me when it comes to my teaching and leading self, but I’m so happy to know that this spark and desire to teach, learn, and write in community still glows inside me, and when I’m doing this work, my heart always feels full.

After Santa Fe, I started to offer more workshops around ideas that inspire me—letters, time, memory, symbols, space, consciousness—and it’s reassuring to know that when I follow my heart, I continue to connect with folks willing to meet me there. I’ve led writing workshops at my local library, at my local book and paper arts center, and now online, through this series I’d been thinking about for months and finally decided to just go ahead and try it.

I’m so very thankful for everyone who took time out of our busy days to pause, slow down and savor the writing process together—writing is lonely and mysterious, writing is strange and stirring, writing is joyful and relieving—it gives me hope to know that I’m in the company of others in this lifelong dance with the written word.

It takes courage to put something out there—a class, a series, a story, a poem, an idea—and sometimes I struggle with self-doubt around it all—who will read this, who will want this, who will care, there’s so much out there already, what do I have to say or offer that can’t be found elsewhere? But I’m realizing over and over again that what YOU put out there IS the greatest gift because it’s coming from you and no one else, and that’s why!

The night before the first workshop in this series, I got a little nervous—not bad nervous, just a little anxious, a little high-energy, a little over prepared, a little jittered and jazzed about it all. And I had to remind myself that even the greats talk about these nerves we all get before we start something new or share something that matters with the world—Ozzy Osbourne said that no matter how many times he performed for enormous audiences, he always got nervous right before a show.

My dad, who played jazz piano nearly every single day of his life, also got the shpilkes every Saturday night, right before his live gig on Facebook during the pandemic. He’d prep and prepare all week, painstakingly select his playlist, research and rehearse over and over again, fully prepared and ready to rumble, and yet, hours before the show, he’d pace the house, a little cranky and a little anxious and super excited, and sometimes kind of hungry, and wondering if he should make a last-minute wardrobe change.

We’ve all been there—we’ve all felt this way—before a big talk, or a performance of any kind, or any time we have to put our hearts out there and say “hi, here I am,” and show up and try and do the best we can with what we’ve got!

So here’s to all of us finding the courage to try—to share—to offer—to grow, because when you do, I do, and vice versa. You know what I mean! I’m excited for the next workshop and the next and look forward to all kinds of future collaborations from this point forward, knowing more concretely now that we already have everything it takes to make it all happen!

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Chaos, creativity, and remembering to forget

2/6/2026

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Chaos unlocks creativity. Every morning, I’ve been obsessed with folding Victorian-era “secret letters.” I always get stuck at the same stage of the process, the second to last moment when the folds feel their way to a rightness and reveals itself. I’m learning that it only comes together if I don’t think too hard about it. Folding paper is a kind of mental yoga. The beginner’s mind is a fine place to dine on humility and awe.

Deep inside, I’m convinced that creativity is inextricably linked to survival, our ability to get through another day or disruption and dissolution, the promise of making something new from the ruins. I became a teacher at the age of 10. My first student was my little sister, who let me teach her lessons in the school I opened in our basement. I assigned homework, designed curricula, evaluated our mutual progress.

Now I think I may need to open another basement school for these underground days. I’m mourning the dissolution of every line and boundary that once defined my interests and life path—poetry, education, travel, language, culture, humanities—all crushed by the currents of this present, historical moment. I know I’m not alone in the casting out or returning within, I have faith in subjective curiosity.

Zanzibar was a relationship with the wind more than anything or anyone else. I fell in love—twice—but love was a condition of the wind. On walks with friends along the shore, my whole body pressed against the sky to take another step, and if I looked down, all I could see were my hennaed feet rooted firmly in the sand, hoping to remain upright against the blue waves. There on the beaches of Bwejuu I had many talks about the illusion of belonging anywhere for too long.

Life exposes us to the “mutable fury of things,” a line I take from “My Brilliant Friend,” by Elena Ferrante. In the book, she’s recollecting the first time she walks with her father to the sea on the shores of Napoli, how the wind slapped her clothes against her body, how the mesh of lights and sounds made it hard to capture the moment. I like anyone who helps me learn how to situate in a place and tell about its particularities.

Tell me again how any of us find ourselves anywhere and claim it was destined? Born one place, flung another—high atlas, deep cave, scraggly cliff, disco dance floor, classroom full of kids, southern exposure, mountain towns, haunted hallways—I can’t name them all. But all writing is a kind of time travel and I’m learning to take you with me—writer as tour guide—memory as map.

The thing I’ve noticed so far about aging, though, is that elders care less about what they remember than about what they feel and what they make. All the greats I’ve observed kept making art, singing their hearts out, banging on the piano, scribbling their notes, until their number was called and they made their cosmic transitions. What if it’s about remembering less and making more up as we go along?

Sometimes I don’t like where my mind takes me in the maze, but I remain loyal to the assignment I’ve given myself this month, to write what comes to me in conversation with the texts I read, and share them with as little interference from the critic within. The morning has disappeared and I’m still here listening to birds tweeting in the frozen snow.

Transit Slips, #6

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travel far now

On making lists, stirring creativity and finding direction in these times

On teaching again and the jitters and jazziness of trying something new

Chaos, creativity, and remembering to forget

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