The Writing Life

I am not Buddhist, but I’m not not Buddhist. Same with Catholicism.

One belief that I share with some Catholics and some Buddhists is that all of life is suffering. For St. Teresa of Calcutta, earthly suffering brings us closer to the state of Jesus, giving us a rare ecstasy that prepares us to meet God.…

Make every word defend its presence.

Read some haiku – study how carefully Basho or Issa select words.

Choose words that evoke. (When a word makes the reader think of other words, you’re expanding your word allotment for free!)

Zoom in – show us the most vivid detail.…

You are a writer. You may not have published a long-form work, but you write and revise, you submit, you pitch. Maybe you are seeking a literary agent. Maybe you plan to self publish. Or maybe you just write and rewrite.…

In an earlier A Work in Progress I wrote about what I most missed after completing coursework for my MA in writing. To fill that gap, I started a writing group. It’s meant so much to me and been so helpful to me that I started a second group.…

Recently, my father, reading a piece of my short fiction, questioned my proclivity for unresolved, unsettling, and often sad endings. He requested that I tie things up with a nice bow and let someone in my next story live happily ever after.…

I started my career as a journalist when I was 20 years old, working as a reporter for the social magazine Sierra Madre in Periódico El Norte, the biggest newspaper in my hometown of Monterrey, Mexico. I was finishing my major in Spanish Literature, and journalism was the closest I could find to a writing job.…

Trigger Warning: Mention of Suicide Attempt

Until I woke up in the hospital in Peru on 27 February 2022, after trying to kill myself with a cocktail of Xanax and Stoli, I had been an English teacher for 22 years. I was so lucky to get intensive inpatient therapy and a better, safer cocktail of medication to regulate my brain chemistry.…

A group of Story Street Writers entered the NYC Midnight 100-word contest together as a fun little exercise. At midnight on a given day, participants are assigned a genre, a word, and an action, and entries must be submitted within 24 hours.…

Stand-up comedian Maria Bamford’s Audible original You Are (A Comedy) Special: A Simple 15-Step Self-Help Guide to Forcibly Force Yourself to Write and Perform a Full Hour of Stand-up Comedy is – well, pretty self-explanatory. The fifteen steps are all very funny and very helpful – check them out (if you have an Audible account, it’s free).…

Friday, February 23, 2024, would’ve been my father’s 77^th birthday. Two years after his passing and in honor of a, in the words of the bishop who celebrated the mass, recalcitrant Catholic, we celebrated his anniversary in church. It was a touching ceremony with aunts and uncles, my daughter Jimena crying as much as she did the day of the funeral, and my sister, who lives in Atlanta, on Facetime. …