If poetry and the arts do anything, they fortify your inner life, your inwardness. Seamus Heaney I embrace my inwardness. The parts of me that are soft and round and full. The parts of me that hold tightly and sweetly and kindly. The parts of me t...

Sentences become presents. Presents passed over back walls, outside the front gates, on the streets. Dorothy Nelson I am thinking about narrative gratitude. I am thinking about the deep gratitude I feel for words and story and connection and belon...

And so on that day in August, in my seventy-eight year, I sat down to begin the memoir which I swore I would never write. Edna O'Brien I wrote a memoir many moons ago. Part exercise in proving I could do it. Part exercise in the practice of writin...

We left Cork determined to return the rental car at the Dublin Airport early enough to get gas and beat the last day of charges. The two-and-a-half-hour drive allowed us to say goodbye to sheep and cow-lined roads, the taste of ivey on clos...