I have designated one little word to be the touchstone for each year for I think 11 years now. They usually come to me pretty easily but I don’t do the best at holding onto them through the year. I thought this year’s one little word was going to be build, but the more I […]
A Little Word for 2022: Release
I’ve been coming up with a little word for each year since 2013 (though I haven’t always written about it). I don’t always do a great job of keeping the word on my mind through the year — last year’s word, experiment, didn’t come up much in my daily life — but each year I […]
A Pep Talk for Creatives Who Just Don’t Want to
I use my morning pages as a conversation with myself pretty often, and this pep talk for creatives came out in pieces over days. It’s what I needed to tell myself; maybe you need someone to tell it to you, too. First, can we just establish that this last the last almost two years has […]
Rereading a Knitting Classic: Knitting without Tears
Many, many years ago, when I was just starting to write about knitting as part of my job, I picked up a copy of Knitting without Tears by Elizabeth Zimmermann. I don’t even know what led me to it. Probably I read somewhere that it was a knitting classic. Maybe I felt that it would […]
One Little Word for 2019
I started writing this post about my One Little Word about a month ago, but I never finished. After looking back at the progress I made in January I figured it was still worth sharing. It’s never too late to come up with a word. I’ve been using the concept of one little word for […]
The Life-Changing Magic of Being a Dabbler
Being a dabbler is a great way to learn new things. It’s probably the way we’re all supposed to be. I spent the weekend with a few of my favorite kick-ass ladies at our self-styled working retreat lovingly acronymed tcoyos. We’ve been doing this for more than three years and, honestly, I don’t know what […]
On Seeing Hamilton and the Value of Experience
I’ve been on a “Hamilton” fast all month. The cast recording and the mixtape. It’s been really hard for a person who listened to one or the other most weeks for the past eight months or so. But there was a really good reason for it. (And I was reading the Chernow book, which kept […]