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Inserting My Voice in Art Writing
When I write my workbooks for Drawing Meditations, I make them more like a series of worksheets than a book: spare and succinct with emphasis on instructions over descriptions of the outcome. It clearly reflects how I teach art. My teacher’s instinct is to let the student discover their own path to creative insights. I…
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Do I Write Like AI?
If you answer yes, I won’t be surprised. I think my writing sounds like AI, and I know why. It’s not to do with em dashes, though I use them enough that I wrote about open vs closed dashes in an article on Medium in 2019. It’s to do with my reading. I am a…
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Ending Notes
Am I obsessed with death? Perhaps. Any of my friends will tell you that I am deeply aware of the passage of time whether it’s mere moments or long ago futures. I am always thinking ahead and looking back. Planning and remembering. That’s who I am. I can’t help it. One of my goals this…
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Books I Should Finish
I don’t mean finish reading. I mean finish writing. A couple days back, I was looking for a file that I am sure I started a couple months back. Was it on my computer? In the cloud? I poked around both spaces. First I discovered that I am really bad at filing my work. I…
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Death and memories
Taking time to remember a person is how I grieve. This may not be the most classic way to process grief, but it works well for me and is influenced strongly by two books: The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier. In this book, a plague has wiped out all but one woman…
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NaNoWriMo 2023
It seems like every few years, I sign up for NaNoWriMo. Write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days? Sure! I “won” in 2010 with my YA novel, 9 Point Plan, and failed in 2004 and 2018. So maybe 2023 will be a winner. UNLABELLED is a hero(ine)’s journey – a coming of age book…
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Ishida Tetsuo and the Bird-Tailed Chisel
In the long-ago time when Edo was founded, there was a stone carver called Ishida Tetsuo. He came from a long line of quarrymen who lived on the Boso Peninsula, where stone was pulled from the mountains and turned into building blocks for the new capital city. He apprenticed with his father, who had left…
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Wonder 2022
It came to me this morning, and settled solidly as the correct word after I had tried on and discarded dozens of candidates. WONDER will guide me in 2022. I considered rise, set, learn, blossom, build, act. They are all good, but none quite felt like the right next step after 2021’s ‘observe.’ Observe was…
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Teaching Community Yoga, a book
I started teaching yoga when I moved out of Tokyo in 2015. At first, I held a weekly class at Satoyama Design Factory, and then a daily class at Monaka, and from the start of the pandemic, a daily morning class via Zoom. Today is Day 415 of the Zoom yoga class – I haven’t…
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Yoga Poetry
Created by Toshiko, Mamiko, Naomi and me during a Friday morning session.
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