Found Between Pause & Doing

Posted on February 13, 2018 by Heloise Jones

The daylight is more than halfway gone as I listen to the snow melt on the flat roof of this Santa Fe house. The stream from the roof is loud as it hits a puddle beside the raised concrete slab of the portal. This day there’s something about the snow that says it’s okay to slow down and meander thru the rooms in my small home. Pretend it’s a holiday. Let go the stomp of shoulds that other wide-open days engender. Even with the sun shining, the sky blue and clear of clouds over the glitter of snow covering the ground, let your mind wander. Perhaps it’s the cushioned silence, or the soft edges the snow puts on the world that makes me feel this way.

What if I simply wrote stories today, I think. See what comes. What if I forget work and soften into this thing twisting me inside out, turning my middle to stone. A feeling I’ve never had before in my long journey with writing.

I was in second grade when I planned my first book. I had a title, table of contents, and several stories written. My parents thought this little book and me brilliant. I abandoned it when it stopped being fun.

I was in third grade the first time I had writer’s block. I sat outside at wooden table and bench composing a poem, inspired by one I saw in the school newsletter. No one ever saw that poem. I didn’t know if I’d done it right, had no sense if it was good or bad, and wouldn’t allow myself to find out.

My first award for creative writing was in 6th grade. My story displayed at an arts fair. ‘Heloise is good at creative writing’ was the note my teacher wrote in my report card that year. At 18, I failed creative writing in college. Our one assignment each Friday in class was to write, anything. Each Friday I turned in a blank sheet of paper. I didn’t know what to write. Didn’t know how to start.

Nine years later, poems flew in like birds and angels as I navigated a painful divorce. Spontaneous, rhyming, complete. Unbidden. I had no way to call them at will. Once I was strong, they disappeared as quickly as they appeared.

Never during these years did I think I was a person who wrote. Even as I journaled. Even with the poems. I was an artist. Visual arts my creative expression and aspiration. It didn’t occur to me that all my jobs involved creativity and writing as I listened and helped people get what they desired.

In my late 30s, in school for the 5th time to earn my bachelor’s degree, I heard a new word – patriarchy. I listened to young women talk about date rape as if it was normal, an accepted risk. I thought of my own experiences. I ignited. I took my Voice and became an activist on that huge university campus. Organizing, writing, speaking to groups, meeting with administrators & professors, founding a campus-wide newsletter for women students & faculty. I was known for my Voice. It was my Superpower. And I used it to lead, and as my instrument to establish a Women’s Center on campus. My experience on that campus is what led me to being a writer. Because six years later, I realized I’d lost my Voice.

In a round-about way I joined a circle of women who met Tuesday afternoons to write to prompts. We read our raw work aloud, responded with a few words to what we heard. And for a year the group sat mute after I read. I vowed I’d quit. I was encouraged to stick with it.

One day, wanting badly to understand why people had nothing to say to my writing, I asked the right question: what can I do to connect? ‘Give them something grounded in the physical world to hold on to,’ the answer.

I started observing the world in a new way. I worked at finding the words to describe what I saw and felt. I stepped close to my experience, wanted to bring the reader & listener close in with me. I studied my craft. Stuck was never an issue to worry about. It was something to ride out. Until now.

These past two weeks since I came out of an intentional two-month pause have bedeviled me.

I know the value of pauses, have written often about it. We put distance between us and our work, come back with new eyes & perspectives. They’re periods of gestation and/or assessment. Ideas & thoughts take form within the relief of space and time. Intentional Pauses are an action. What happened next is where I got lost.

I jumped to the next action phase as I saw it, tasks. . .my interpretation of a favorite quote, ‘When you’re in motion, the form will emerge’ by Michael Hyatt. And something went wrong. I wasn’t moving. Couldn’t make myself move. Even with wanting it and seeing how my intentions dovetailed who I am, what I love to do, my skills & genius, and my beliefs & purpose. This was more than fear, or procrastination, or perfectionism. It felt so.darned.hard. I flogged myself, then decided to feed my soul.

I saw author Colum McCann in conversation with actor Gabriel Byrne. Their entire conversation about STORY. Colum McCann struck me deep when he said, “The best writing makes us sit up and take notice and it makes us glad that we are––however briefly––alive.” Yes, oh Yes.

I went to a monthly talk put on by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. That day’s presentation called ‘Color as a Verb.’ It featured a well-known artist, Sam Scott, and the Museum’s preservationist. I loved it. Especially the part about the science of color in the brain, and how our brain creates most of the colors we see because it wants all the primary colors. That reminded me of hunger and longing in a story. When Sam Scott said, “See art with the eye of your heart, not with your expectations,” I substituted Story for art, heard the echo of my own words.

Once I relaxed and followed my intuition, what I needed to move forward arrived in wondrous ways – Bam! Thank you! with a big Yea. My brilliant ideas had legs.

I was lost in that middle ground of awareness and receptivity – the action between pause and doing. The place that asks the all-important right questions for connection. And it’s where I got found.

This Folk art birdy has been with me since 1998.
We’d left Santa Fe for Asheville, NC. The house we bought was owned by a collector. The birdies were permanently attached to branches along the windows of a closed-in porch. I still have three. Their beaks & tails are chipped. Their metal wings bent. Scars. All results from falling from high places, the perches I chose for them. And still they smile. I love them. In a way, they kinda remind me of Me.

We’re alive. We’re in motion.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.

Photo: Thought Catalog

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Stories, Our Connective Tissue

Posted on January 23, 2018 by Heloise Jones

So it surprises me now to hear
the steps of my life following me ––
so much of it gone. . .
as though a prayer had ended
and the bit of changed air
between the palms goes free
to become the glitter
on some common thing that inexplicably shines.
~ Galway Kinnel (from ‘The Still Time’)
*

I saw the author of ‘The Artist’s Way,’ Julia Cameron, give a presentation recently. A friend who knows her introduced us. I was thrilled. I’d read her book in the early 90s when it first came out, and participated in a weekly group around the its principles. These groups grew into a worldwide phenomenon, and continue today. When she heard about my book ‘The Writer’s Block Myth,’ she wanted to know more and where to get a copy. I gifted her one. Somehow that felt special.

My take-away of the evening was the value of ‘morning pages.’ Three pages written in longhand first thing upon rising. Clear the mind, get the frets and broiling stuff up and out. What if you write 4 pages, someone asked. We get full of ourselves, Julia said. You’ve hit the real (sometimes hard) stuff by 1-1/2 pages. At three you get the heart of what you need and the magic happens. Seems there’s always a number before it’s too much or something else, doesn’t it? I made a vow to get back to morning pages.

I’ve been thinking A LOT about empowerment lately. This is no secret. I’ve written about it here. I’ve planned a retreat around women’s empowerment. I wrote a book of empowerment for writers and creatives. Behind my thoughts, the power of our words, spoken and written. How our stories are key in the narrative of our lives, and in a society’s narrative. Because stories are the glue of relationships and cultures. They drive us. They guide compassion and fear, biases and action. In the best of worlds, they have the power to light us up inside so we feel strong and confident, and we see we’re not alone. They’re a way to connect with ourselves and others, and have a Voice.

The truth of this is everywhere. I asked the lab tech if it was an iwatch I saw on her wrist as she drew my blood. It was. Do you like it? How do you use it? I asked. The questions I’ve had about this thing I perceived as frivolous, mainly because I couldn’t see a reason for it except as a gadget to further bombard one with info. She changed my mind with her story. ‘I have a special needs kid. He’s sight impaired,’ she said. ‘I get messages from his teachers during the school day. Now I can respond fast when I couldn’t before because our phones have to be off in the lab.’ A moment of connection with another person. A shift in perception for me. And for her, she had a voice, was more than her lab coat to this stranger.

I have a friend whose son is autistic. Speaking to people, especially in public, is hard for him. She home schools him, and posts some of her experiences with him on Facebook. The kid is brilliant. His response to his environment fascinating. Such as he knows and spells words I don’t have a clue the meaning of. Words far longer than the four & five letter words they had him read in public school. He saw a need, and decided he’ll found a university when he grows up.

I particularly love his answer to a woman who posed the question whether it’s OK to explain her child’s autism to strangers, or if privacy is more respectful and less ‘labeling.’ His spelled response: MY STORY IS SO TOTALLY WORTH NICE PEOPLE HEARING BECAUSE I REALLY LIKE MY DIFFERENT WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD. (caps his) It’s not just his answer I love. I love the message inside it.

He’s a kid with no throwaway comments like you and I have. This one sentence took significant time and energy to say. And it was important to him to share it. Because he wants the world to hear it. He has a Voice, he sees and processes the world differently than most, and he’s empowered with that knowledge. He’s OK. I rather like that he says ‘nice people,’ too. As if he knows some people aren’t owed an explanation of who he is. The simple fact is his brain works differently, his way of communicating is often difficult to understand, and that makes him different. I think different is OK.

It always gets down to how we stay focused and move toward the goals we desire. How we live a creative life. Especially for writers. What’s the secret for seeing and listening with the assumption the story will be interesting, and ignoring, as poet Maya Stein says, the catcalls of the deadlines.

My intent for morning pages the day after I saw Julia Cameron didn’t happen as planned. I wrote 2 pages the first morning. The following two mornings, I forgot. It’s been off and on sporadic since. I heard others’ stories, and wasn’t hearing my own. Then last week, I got pulled deep, deep down into sleep. A nap in the afternoon, and again all thru the night. My dreams full and fat with presence and lots going on. My limbs weighed a thousand pounds when I rose the next day. Mid-afternoon, the BLUES came on with all caps. They curled up inside me, made a nest of my heart. I felt inconsequential and questioned myself, what I’m doing, & not. Those stories felt more real than all the good stuff in my life. At 2:30pm, I decided to write my morning pages.

I followed the pen, didn’t lead when I wrote, as I know to do. I was present and paid attention, resisting the urge to judge words or myself. I connected with both sides of the narratives running thru me. The one that squeezed my heart, and the one that stood in the shadows and needed a Voice. My perspectives shifted. My view of myself grew. I felt the blood move thru my arms and legs once more. I didn’t have answers. I had my Voice back. I wrote myself back up & onto my feet.

I live with these truths. . .Our Voice is our Superpower. Our stories are our connective tissue.
Tell your stories. The true ones. The ones in your strong heart without fear.

In the morning when you rise, write 3 pages longhand – your morning pages. Stick with it, finish the three. Note what you discover, what shifted, and how you feel at the end.

Photo: Jonatan Pie

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Writing My Way Out

Posted on January 12, 2018 by Heloise Jones

“Telling stories and reading stories changes you. Both allow one human being to reach more deeply into the experiences of another. Both involve our two greatest gifts:
the tools of empathy and imagination.”
~ Nancy Peacock, author & NC Piedmont Laureate

I’ve been in a deep pause for weeks – from who I thought I was in the shape of my life, and with writing. It’s been insular, and quiet, and pregnant with something I don’t know, yet.

I know the value of pauses. I wrote about it here. Even included a half dozen ways to intentionally pause. And this pause has not been easy to sink into with trust that what matters to me, like connecting with you each week, will be there when I come back. Hovering in the back of my mind is what might melt away.

A pause can be a journey when you soften into it. We come out the other side changed, often with unimagined insights or a valuable shift in perspective. The same as when reading a book, or traveling. And yet, it’s not the same as riding the length of an archipelago in Taiwan on the back of a scooter, or diving into another’s created world.

Last week, thinking the December pause was over, I had two strong days flying toward goals, feeling gloriously in the flow of my two words for 2018 (Connect & Commit). I told myself ‘I’ve got this’. . . then, Bam. Violent, ugly, mean, ravaging food poisoning the very night of my high five with myself. Dehydrating fast, my legs crunched into excruciating cramps in the midst of it. All night it had me, giving me no rest ‘til 5:30am.

I didn’t move from the bed for the next 24 hrs. I slept. A glass & pitcher of water on the bedside table. Drifting in and out, I heard the soft cool hum of the small humidifier atop a towel on the floor, noticed the shift in the light thru the blinds at the window, glanced at the bright red numbers on the clock. I felt the hollow of my empty middle, and the cool straight stream of water running throat to stomach inside me each time I had a sip. I noted the 3 count glug from the humidifier when the water in the reservoir dropped, and the click in the radiators when they turned on. Waterwaterwater.

I took no measure of how I felt beyond the weight of the blankets. Gave no thought to what I was missing beyond regret over the talk I really wanted to hear about Georgia O’Keefe’s intentional garb for her persona. My world and being was rest & hydration, care of my body. The only thing that mattered.

The next day I rose with the sun. Fatigued and foggy-brained, I intended to recover that whole day I lost. I was on a roll, had to catch up, my thinking. And the fog in the brain simply wouldn’t clear. It was as if all progress forward and my list of to-do’s floated away on a breeze, and I could only watch.

The hard part is I fought that fog with every half-firing brain cell I had for two entire days. When I finally gave in, I remembered those little details of my day in bed. Marveled at how present I must’ve been to my environment. And I thought back to the Christmas fable of my last blog.

Shortly after I published ‘A Christmas Fable,’ I read a blog from 13 months earlier. I was in Santa Fe for my yearly sojourn. A time I looked forward to every year. I spent most of my days on that trip at the computer writing The Writer’s Block Myth. In the midst of this writing retreat, an author came for a personal 4-day retreat to work with me on her book. I was busy. My favorite drives into the countryside where the sky felt forever and lines of golden-yellow trees ran along waterways were rare. I mostly gazed at the saturated blue fall sky thru windows. Watched aspens and cottonwoods in the garden move thru yellows & golds to dropping their leaves. And yet, the tone of that blog was light, as was the name, ‘Saying the Word Lucky.’ The language vivid. I was present to the writing, and there was joy at the heart of my sharing. A strong contrast to the blog I’d just written where I described a day where I was indeed intensely present in every moment, and yet, not present in the writing.

I went back into ‘A Christmas Fable,’ added sensory details. I saw again the tiny things that touched me, and added them. I asked a writer-friend to re-read and share what she thought. Then, in some strange twist, I never saw her response.

When I rose from bed fatigued and spent the day after recovery, the first emails I saw were hers and another’s. Both about the Christmas fable. Both arriving 4 days earlier, before my two high-five days! I was stunned.

Each said how much the blog touched them. Joy to the heart, tears in the eyes touched them. Writing is connection. Presence in writing is the heart of connection.

I then became present to the series of pauses I’ve gone thru, and continue to be in. Both in life and in writing. I’d not written in a month, a pause that was needed. And I’d not paused in the writing for connection with myself or the reader. That pause also something needed. I caught the disconnect, and still it took the pause with foggy brain to bring me back to the present of what matters right now as I chart this next year.

I don’t know what this extended deep pause is about. It feels like I’m near some sort of new, unknown event horizon. I can make myself crazy, or I can trust it to unfold and focus on the next thing in front of me. What I know is how we are with our writing is how we are in our life, and visa versa. As actress Elizabeth Moss said, “We are the story in print, and we are writing the story ourselves.” And in the writing, we change a little inside. It’s a very good thing. It’s time I get back writing.

I leave you with this wish from Neil Gaiman, and me:

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next <this> year, you surprise yourself.”

Time to surprise ourselves.

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Follow the Story

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Heloise Jones

“Stories let us find the lesson.
They don’t demand a particular one.
You pick the meaning you are ready for.”
~ Art Jones
*

I started writing late in life. Like, way past qualifying as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35.” There were periods – recognitions for stories in elementary school, poems coming thru me unbidden as I processed a painful divorce, works in college that earned praises like ‘platonic ideal.’ And yet, it took realizing I’d lost my Voice to deliver me to a writing circle where I discovered what being a writer is. Where I learned to let go of control, follow the work and be surprised. Where I was encouraged to stick with it, and finally asked the right questions to learn my craft. That led me to write books.

Letting go was even part of my process with “The Writer’s Block Myth.” I gathered supporting materials and conducted interviews without judgement, expectation, critique, or organizing. Saw it all dovetail and fall seamlessly into place, in desired order (something I wrote about here).

I’m not saying writing is easy. Only that there’s wisdom in the process beyond the limits of our imaginations. That having a beeline to our imagination is the beginning.

So, whether we outline, hold strong intention, or write as a pantser like me, who rarely knows beyond a loose framework ’til I’m in it, trusting the work gives us more to create with. Because the work has a life of its own.

Let me tell you a story how I know. I believed my novel done when I sat down to compose a log line, the one-liner that starts ‘This book is about. . .” Before I wrote one word beyond those four, I heard the little voice: ‘You don’t know what this book is about.’ I leaned back in my chair, didn’t go on. I wrote 10,000 more words in the novel. Allowed the second protagonist to have her full say. And not ’til then was the book Done. Not ’til then did I see the real & full story revealed.

This process of following the story can be dramatic. One day my husband walked thru the room where I was writing, saw me crying. Why was I crying, he wanted to know. ‘This is so beautiful,’ I said. ‘But you’re the writer. You know how it ends,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know this,’ I told him. ‘She wasn’t in the room where I thought she’d be.’ That scene is still one of my favorites, where even my editor cried on reading it.

Did I mention, yet, that it’s fun writing this way?

I believe memoir (story of memory) is like this, too. The memories like characters in our minds with voices, feelings, and ways they lived during moments of time.

Recently I heard actor and voice-over artist Cameron Gregg in an interview. His words sent a shock of recognition thru me:

All art is selection and arrangement.

Shift perspective. Give new meaning to the human condition, and insight into the different forms human condition can take. Help knit that story together. Think, what is the singular thing that happened in their (a character) life that made them who they are?

My gosh, Yes. In Life, too. Now more than ever.

We’re always in the works we create. We’re documentarians who can’t disappear in the photo or film, our position and person is revealed. Like Ken Burns who says all his work is about waking the dead. That he knows the story he’s retelling is waking his mother who he never saw out of bed before she died when he was a boy. Or in my novel, my retelling a part of my childhood, and connecting to nature, something I love deeply. In life, it’s how we select and arrange memories, pain points, intentions, ideas, beliefs, biases, name it, creating a lens we see the world thru, from which we tell our stories.

All to say what I know writing and life is – showing what it is to be human. That words are important. Observing with awareness is critical to being present. And writing is connection, period. Writers are powerful. Here, said much better by author Richard Bausch. The last sentence the bottom line:

“We think too much about the meaninglessness of existence; we have taken in the idea of life as an absurd proposition, and all our suffering becomes ridiculous. But a writer senses meaning in ‘the mystery of things,’ and reports about the discoveries that come from merely setting narrative in motion, letting people move and breathe and be in the prose, and that is what finally connects us all, across time and distance and the grave itself. We are about SHOWING the human journey as itself, what Conrad meant when he said that above all he wanted to make us SEE. Wanted to make us feel the ‘solidarity of the human family.’ This is why it’s such important work, what Bill Maxwell in a letter to me called ‘this blessed occupation.’ So the reward is in the act itself, of giving forth meaning through expression in this miraculous way, with words. Our coin, our spark and music, the bread of our daily existence. It isn’t work, so much as it is the central element of our nature: our beautiful tending toward expression. Set it into motion again, friends. It’s what we have against the dark—no less than that.”

Everything he says, + we never know who our words will touch, or when. That quote at the top is by my husband. He read little fiction until one Christmas 15 yrs. after I claimed being a writer. That Christmas he asked for a novel. I bought him a short stack of novels and short stories. Now he shares what he reads with me. He didn’t read my novel “Flight” until 8 yrs. after it was done. He carried it to work with him, not wanting to miss a thing. He didn’t read my blog for two years. Now he comments, and subscribed to get it in his inbox. We never know.

It’s the holiday season. The greatest time ever for stories, both personal and seasonal. I admit, some days I’m in the midst of the muck. And my wish remains, now and always, we all live and love our best creative life. It’s what we have against the dark.

Set up a bag, box, or container you enjoy looking at in a place where you see it easily and often. If you’re working on a story or project, put whatever you come across that may apply in it. Do not edit, critique, or consciously think about it once it’s tucked away. If you’re not working on something specific, put quotes, paragraphs, and whatever touches you in your container. Two-four-six weeks later, pull it all out. Prepare to be surprised as you see what stories and threads show up. For your work, and for you life.

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Where You Put Your Camera

Posted on November 15, 2017 by Heloise Jones

When curiosity outweighs our expectations, we find more delight than disappointment in the day.
~ Oriah ‘Mountain Dreamer’ House
*

I’m venturing out at night, again. It’s part of my intention to live life beyond work and rebuilding a home. To return to what engages my wonder and awe, feeds my heart, mind, and curiosity.

Tho I feel so very lucky to be here with the privileges I have, my permissions to myself it’s okay to let go betray me. They’ve come with lying on the sofa at the end of a day for too long. I sometimes briefly nod off in the darkened rooms at events. My bobbing head waking me to what I’m missing. Travel, my other companion to such permissions, has been absent for three years.

Self forgiveness can be hard. Because I know what I missed is extraordinary. A moment that can’t be recovered. It’s sometimes a tug to turn my attention back to the present. This is a key message in my book and workshops. Proof it happens to all of us.

The latest episode was a few weeks ago when I saw an extraordinary humanitarian and photo-journalist. Iranian-French Reza Deghati who works under the name Reza. His vitae includes covers on National Geographic, Time, and Newsweek, + decades of travels around the world, often living in far flung or war torn (read, dangerous) locales for months at a time. Places that are words in the News for most of us in the US, or ghosts in the living rooms of vets come back from their experience.

Reza’s images are intimate, and bear witness to the stories of individual lives. Stories etched on the subject’s face or belongings – a girl’s favorite dolls for sale on a street corner to buy food for her grandmother who hasn’t eaten in three days; a child’s stiff, frost-covered sneakers that needed to thaw before she could go to class; dirt, expression, focus. The faces and postures revealing the details of their stories without words. We don’t need to see the buildings reduced to ash to imagine what being human is for them. Or for all the others with them, trapped in history.

Reza says his goal is to help people tell their own stories. To give them the tools to do it. He spoke of poetry. How he reads poetry every day. I wrote as he spoke, capturing nearly all his words:

Poets have reached the extreme beauty of humanity. They use the same words we all know – and then, put them together into something that touches the heart and mind. Same with the image where you can see the words of poetry. Both take you out of your daily life and put you deep inside yourself.

Wow, I thought. Exactly.

He ended with a thought I think applies to writers, as well. Or any of us, for that matter: “Where do you put your camera? Your brain, your heart, your stomach, or under you belt.”

I asked this question in a workshop. The answers from the participants surprised me. Most began somewhere else (their brain, under their belt, their gut), then traveled to their hearts. And it seemed those, like me, who feels it with my entire body, did not feel disconnected with the heart. It was as if when we’re given the invitation to notice, we all know the heart is our true compass.

I often say writers and artists are powerful. For Reza, a young man documenting the political struggles in Iran in the 70s, he realized photographs were perceived as actual weapons by the Iranian government. He was arrested, spent three years in prison for his photos. He was tortured there, then forced into exile when released. Forced from his native ground.

In a section of Reza War and Peace titled “Thoughts of an Exile,” he writes:

“Within you remains the memory of your lost country, and you may feel disappointment in the land where you are now living, the country you thought would be your promised land and beyond it your way of being free. There remains, too, a feeling of mourning for your native land.

This grief is always with you below the surface, but the longing for your homeland is called up even more acutely by a tangible reminder of your country — a familiar smell, a food that tastes like a dish back home, a countryside that evokes scenes from your childhood. You feel it as well when you hear someone speak your language and you hear once again the melody of your native tongue. For the exile, the joys of the present are full of memories of the past.

I can’t help thinking about Reza as we head into Thanksgiving and the holiday season, a time where connection with family is emphasized. Or thinking about how intimate his images are. How they so often reflect longing for Home. How this season brings Home up for so many of us. How so many feel like exiles in one way or another.

I also can’t help thinking how longing for Home is at the heart of my novels. And how over the past nearly 3 years of my blog, I’ve written Home is up for me 4-5 times. Just this year, during the extreme physical hardship I went thru to get back my soul home, Santa Fe.

The stories we see outside us are nearly always reflections of something that resides inside us. Not word for word, thought for thought, detail for detail, but connection. I believe this reflection always happens when you chronicle the human heart. I work with writers. See it again and again.

In this moment, I see my work with writers as connection in a way I hadn’t thought about before, too. As I hold space for them, ask the questions leading to discovery of what matters for them, offer help so they find the way to say it. . .it’s like Reza who gives cameras to people so they can tell their own stories. It’s my genius, delivering metaphorical cameras. My charge from the Universe. No wonder I love what I do and feel it all magical. Big Heart moments. We’re made of stories, and connection.

Another small journey. Getting to Wise.
A Writer’s Life.
*

Tell me. . .Where do you put your camera?

*
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