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The Wrong Lesson
A couple of weeks ago, I became frustrated while prepping for my Introduction to Creative Writing class. I was trying to decide on a writing exercise to use for our lesson on character, and…
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Building a Sustainable Writing Practice
Fall has always felt like a season of re-commitment to my writing. Often that’s taken the form of really digging into a particular project — either beginning something new or deep revision of a…
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Begin. Again.
The new year for me always feels like it starts in September rather than January. Even those years when I’ve been neither a student nor a teacher, there is something about fall that always…
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Stretching the Canvas
In spring 2020, I attend a Zoom workshop with Jenny Offill on Writing Erasure Poetry and Flash Fiction. The entire session was insightful, but one of the main things I took away from the…
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Great Expectations
I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. Possibly because the writing of the second draft of my novel is so different from how I expected it would be. When I started working on this…
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Don’t Judge Your Process
A few years ago, I had a meeting with one of the professors in my MFA program. We were meant to discuss an idea I had for a novel, but instead, we talked mainly…
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Moving Lessons
I spent most of May moving from one space in my house to another—and doing all the tasks that go along with any sort of move. Packing, cleaning, lugging, re-painting, unpacking, figuring out what…
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Cradling Earthworms
It rained last night, and on my walk this morning, there were several earthworms who had been forced out of the ground. Earthworms always make me think of this period in my life when…
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I can’t
When I was eight, I decided I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I still have my earliest efforts, the covers made out of old scraps of wallpaper, stories of missing…
heather debling 