culture
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Write on the Back Burner
A Meditation for When You Feel Stuck in Your Writing I grew up surrounded by my mother’s big family in the northeastern reaches of Appalachia. Mother and her eight siblings were products of the Depression — hard-shelled, thrifty people who remembered what it was like to go hungry and live without warm clothing and well-fitting… Continue reading
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What Health Experts Get Wrong about Seniors and Solitude
“Chuck all that!” says GCHiker in his YouTube video Why I Avoid People. Responding to health experts who advise older people to maintain social contacts to avoid a variety of age-related health problems, GCHiker heartily disagrees. An intrepid hiker and solitary wanderer, he says he has grown quite comfortable in his later years with being alone. Confessing that… Continue reading
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The Myth and the Truth about My Great-Grandpa
I always knew something was wrong with the story. When my mother described Great-Grandpa to me when I was a child, he seemed like a mythical hero — mysterious and larger than life. She spoke of him with admiration, but reluctantly, as if his story was a secret with which I was too young to… Continue reading
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Dr. Rick, Can You Help Me? I’m Becoming My Mother
Aunt Peach used to tell me I was Daddy’s girl. When I was a child, she reminded me often that I looked like my father. “It’s good luck for a little girl to look like her daddy,” she said. At the very least, I suppose, it suggested that her mother had stayed on the straight-and-narrow,… Continue reading
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If Empathy Can Be Taught, It Should Be
The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.~Hannah Arendt Close your eyes. I imagine myself saying those words to my college writing students. After giving them an assignment and reminding them of the importance of planning and pre-writing in the composition… Continue reading
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
Person on the Page 