Author: Monica Graff

After two decades of editing scholarly monographs for university presses, I decided to put down my red pen and pick up a black one. It's a lot more fun! Some of my musings have been published on various websites and in two anthologies.

Intuition and the I Ching

Sometimes you have a writing project in mind that you can see ever so vaguely but don’t know where to start. Or, maybe you’ve gotten a good running leap at it and then all of a sudden you’re out of steam and stuck in the mud. Now what?

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Sink Don’t Swim

What the stalled or not-yet-started writer needs is some magic for getting in touch with himself, some key.

—John Gardner

While writing in my journal the other morning, it occurred to me why it’s so easy to plop down on the daybed and scribble in those pages as opposed to working on my “real writing.”

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Serendipity

noun: the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way: a fortunate stroke of serendipity | a series of small serendipities.

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Getting Real

Last week’s post naturally leads to this one, which is about facing fears. One of the biggest fears I’ve had my whole life, without really being aware of its powerful hold on me, is authentic self-expression.

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The Big Li(f)e

In my early thirties I sat on the veranda of my father’s B&B at sunset and watched a barge move a load of coal up the Ohio River. It was a scene ripe with symbolism that I couldn’t see at the time. I’d just escaped a dangerous, dial 911 romantic relationship several states away, taking nothing with me but what I could shove into my little Mazda, including my two cats.

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