Brave Voice

12/12/2023

Three more days until our early bird rate flies away. Please consider joining Kelley Hunt and me for our 19th annual Brave Voice: Writing & Singing for Your Life May 12-17 in the Flint Hills of Kansas. Come create, relax, explore, make new friends, replenish your spirit, and discover more of what you have to say to yourself and the world. See http://bravevoice.com for details.

11/25/2019

Hello storytelling friends - I wanted to warmly invite you to "The Art of Facilitation," an online class I'm co-leading with Joy Roulier Sawyer that speaks to many aspects of how leading workshops, coaching sessions, meetings, and more helps us live our vision and do more good work in the world. The class runs from Jan. 15-Feb. 25, and you can do it from anywhere, plus it's on sale until Dec. 25. More here:

What does it mean to facilitate arts- and change-based workshops, coaching or consulting sessions, meetings and classes that help people amplify their voice and illuminate their vision? Designed for writers, storytellers, performers, artists, community leaders, healers, and change-makers, this class...

06/05/2018

I started teaching when I was 26. It was English 101 at the University of Kansas, a gig I figured would help me get through graduate school so I could cozy up with my real calling: writing. A funny thing happened on the way through the classroom: I was instantly smitten and soon discovered that [......

05/24/2018

With temperatures rising to summertime and good rains falling last week, everything is speeding into growth around this house. The hostas look like they’re on steroids, and all blossoming things are exploding into petals until they’re spent to thin, brown paper. Within the house of this human, a...

05/17/2018

Why are they so mind-blowingly beautiful? Is it the delicate petal, something between paper and flesh? Or the enormous resilience of seemingly delicate twists of blossoming ethers that can hold up their angel bodies in ferocious storms and come up smiling the next morning? Is it the colors — batik...

05/04/2018

Did you know you can sing “Weeding in the Rain” to the same tune as “Singing in the Rain”? In a sense, both songs are about falling in love, at least for Gene Kelly and me. After weeks of not getting to the garden for a garden variety of reasons — book release stuff to [...] Read More

04/26/2018

Usually, April, what T.S. Eliot called the cruelest month, is, but it’s also stunningly beautiful, a paradox for a working poet and a gal who, all too often, couldn’t say no. Because I make a hunk of my living from gigs — readings, workshops, talks, projects — and a good many poetry gigs are...

04/01/2018

Every March, I seek the magnolia trees growing recklessly in Kansas where it’s almost guaranteed that their tree-full of pink blossoms will meet Mean Old Mr. Winter with a fury. These trees are meant to grow in warmer climes, but they seem to survive okay here despite an annual attack (or two) of ...

03/27/2018

Our long gravel drive was puddled and muddy, so there was no way the huge semi carrying my new book, Miriam’s Well: A Modern Day Exodus, could slip-slide to our house without asking for trouble, plus there’s the matter of the power lines it would rip through in the journey. So between ordering b...

03/20/2018

Nothing like a brisk walk on the first day of spring in East Lawrence with a good friend. Along the way, we saw many more friendly sites, all illuminating the wonderful quirkiness of East Lawrence just on the cusp of leafing out and flowering forth. First, there is a totem tree of sorts, complete wi...

03/16/2018

I love the prevernal season perhaps best of all: that space between the start of spring and before the leafing out of the big, green world. There’s such a brief series of moment between the last dregs of winter and first flush of spring, snow and daffodils, or sub-zero nights and thunderstorm afte...

03/14/2018

What does Right Livelihood mean in the context of TLA? How does it relate to finding and staying in conversation with our life’s work while keeping the cupboards and gas tank full as well as caring for our health, art, soul, and community? Laura Packer and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, between them, hav...