drmstream[writing]

The ques­tion you have to answer is whether you hold your­self away or throw your­self in; whether you ignore the con­se­quences of fail­ing and insist that the joy is from try­ing; whether you keep mov­ing when you feel your­self slow­ing down. Here is a para­ble: A woman pushes a gro­cery cart up a steep side­walk. The […]

  I responded to two e-mails today from young men who were look­ing for some life guid­ance.  After the appro­pri­ate pre­am­bles, I wrote exactly the same thing to both. Here are three ques­tions to ask your­self: What per­sonal skills and per­sonal attrib­utes do I pos­sess that will cause peo­ple to give me money? What kind of things […]

I love you with every piece of my being. I’m inside you all the time. I am strong because you are strong. I see beauty because you are beau­ti­ful.  I can be open and gen­er­ous because you hold my heart gen­tly. You but­tress the peo­ple around you. I want you to know that I will but­tress you, I […]

I take Adderal. I didn’t used to.  I’m writ­ing an essay about it — the work­ing title is Under­stand­ing My Stu­pid. The thing about writ­ing an essay is that you have to tease out the sense in things that are loosely con­nected in your head.  Some­times the essay peters out because the things that you […]

  It started when I butted in on a Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion between @juanviejo and @susanchamplin, two peo­ple I enjoy­ing fol­low­ing.  They’d been dis­cussing com­mence­ment addresses made by David Fos­ter Wal­lace and Jonathan Franzen. I came in strong, shoot­ing for con­cise and emphatic with my two-Tweet attack. being utterly aware of human­ness doesn’t have to cause pain. […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

  When we read a story, our brains plot every­thing that’s going on, from the character’s phys­i­cal loca­tions in space to their inter­ac­tions with objects in the envi­ron­ment to their pur­suit of var­i­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tional goals.  Many of the brain areas active while read­ing are also active when we actu­ally take part in or […]

Sit­ting in the sec­ond story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daugh­ter Becky some­thing about liv­ing. She’s laid up with a bro­ken foot that’s keep­ing her from work­ing at the micro-distillery where she found a job after com­ing back from Louisiana, […]

I was going through my papers and found three pages of loose notes. They must be recent, but I don’t know why I made them, whether they are my own ideas or notes jot­ted down from some­thing that I read or saw. They are orga­nized but hur­ried. They com­prise a man­i­festo of sorts. I just […]

The table was made out of an old wire spool.  We cut the top off, pulled the slats out and made a tri­an­gu­lar base from heavy maple.  I don’t know how many yards of wire the spool held, but it must have been a lot, because we could fit the eight of us around the […]