Writing About Love

Writers, as I compose this note to you all, I’m listening to a trivia contest about celebrity micro-marriages, unions that lasted all of 72 days or nine days or even just 55 hours. Love, it seems, can go spectacularly wrong.

As can our writing about it. You know what I mean—the over-flowery, purple, cringe-inducing paeans to amore; the clinical descriptions of looks or worse, body parts. (Quelle horreur.) The clichés.

We trip ourselves up when our focus is too narrow, trying to evoke a single feeling, where love is ephemeral, and when you’re in it, it’s a state of being. Maybe, what we need to do is think of love as an environment.  Continue reading “Writing About Love”

Love and Other Things

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season, perhaps sharing good times with your family (real or cobbled together). From all those smiles I see on holiday cards and social media, it looks like you did.

But…those public photos seldom tell the full story.

My family is perfect, of course—proof found in that photo of my daughter Sahara—but I recently peered into the messiness of family life.  Continue reading “Love and Other Things”