I’ve been an advocate for and practitioner of “slow writing” for decades though I never knew there was a name for it. Others can have their NaNoWriMo or their finish-your-novel-in-six-weeks or -a-weekend or however speedily they want to go. A daily practice of anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours with an occasional long weekend or even longer retreat thrown in is what works for me.
Tag Archives: journal
Writing Place — The Geography of Our Lives
My family moved to San Diego from northwest Missouri when I was a young girl, and I thought my dad had brought me home to paradise — the constant sun, the endless ocean, oranges that grew in our own backyard, and oh, those sexy Mexican American boys with their slim hips and dark eyes, and Mexico itself just across the border.
But paradise or no, there was a time when I abdicated to Los Angeles and a time, somehow, surprisingly, when I wound up in Oklahoma, neither of which felt like home. I also settled in San Francisco briefly, lived in Barcelona for a couple of years, and located myself in Paris for a few frigid months during the winter of my forty-eighth year.