A road trip, a forest fire, and a father-son talk about Animal Crossing. Recently, I drove cross country with my 16 year-old son. We’d spent the summer hiding out in the soy fields of rural Ohio, folded into my sister and mother’s routines, staying in their home, far from the…

Start with a blank sheet of notebook paper. And a pencil. — Years ago, a series of well-placed Facebook ads convinced me to buy an enhanced planner (at a very high price point) “specifically engineered” to help me build a successful routine. I was excited for its arrival, and gleefully leapt into the protocol that the planner advised: painting an ideal morning…

I was a bank robber fleeing the scene of the crime. My safe house was complete individuality, absolute artistic freedom — the opposite of the life I lived in NYC. After college, I moved to New York to “be” a writer. It seemed like what one did; like in the…

Learning to write just enough to reach, but not so much as to strain. Daily. For years, I’d lost the essential connection to writing: joy. I still felt like I needed to do it. I still felt bad if I didn’t do it. …

I didn’t always know why I was writing. Now I do — kinda. That’s enough. When I was a (younger) aspiring writer, I worried that writing was a self-indulgent exercise. In a sense, perhaps, it was: I wanted to write in order to prove myself, win praise, and be accepted…

It’s taken me over 20 years to write about what happened to me in high school, and I’m OK with that. When I was 15 years old, I experienced a strange and abusive friendship. It lasted the length of a school year, and was both traumatizing and self-defining. …

Why I gave up the search for the perfect writing space and learned to write anywhere. I recently engaged in a conversation with an old friend about “where” I write. She was describing her ideal writing nook: surrounded by worn hardbacks, a view of the sea, a soft breeze entering…