Three weeks until my coursework at Columbia is finished.  There has not been one day that I took it for granted and walked without knowing the immense weight, gift, and privilege it is to study the craft of writing.

I’ve been processing offline in my friendships – having friends over for dinner, long talks with a handful of confidants, and jotting down fleeting thoughts about grief & the end of things.

I take great comfort in the words of so many talented professors I had who expressed uncertainty if they knew what constitutes great writing.  It’s art.  It’s subjective.  It’s varied and complex.  But the one thing that writing demands is an authoritative voice.  A knowing presence stringing one word to the next.  I’m still experimenting with my voices.  Because I don’t have just one, I learned.  I have many.

My writing is hovering near the surface because I’m emotionally overwhelmed these days.  The end of things.

I have a hard time letting go, even when I know when I’m ready to move on.

I’m learning so much I’m afraid to stop learning.

But learning is in the silence, the rumination between two puzzle pieces – past and present – reconciling their differences before fusing together.

Learning is in the silence of transforming what you thought yesterday.

You are what you think today.  An accumulation of the past.

One of the most difficult components of writing is learning how to write literature about faith. Specifically, personal essays that sing about the sinner-saint identity which lies at the crux of compelling identity-faith-politics writing.

When I identity as a Catholic and as a writer, some people assume I’m this surreptitious evangelical, trying to make others believe what I believe. When, really, I’m not one to try to teach others something I’m not entirely sure of myself.  I’m not certain.  I’m just haunted.

I have an obsession with God, or the idea of God, the phenomenon of people who worship and participate in ritual, engaging in folktale, story, and mantra. I find it all fascinating: the creeds, hymns, stories, hypocritical behaviors, hierarchy, history, fallacies and the unexplainable.

I’m not here to tell you what you should believe. I write to consider what all the mess might mean. And in that inchoate understanding, I try on sentences that express what I find. It’s hard.

Don’t be scared off when I say I’m Catholic.  Believe me, I’m skeptical enough for the both of us.  But every once in a while, a tweet comes along that I can get on board with.

While waiting for the 7 Bus, I took a meditative moment.  It emulated exactly what my writing feels like inside me, right now.  There are many branches of ideas, some of them are broken; snapped in half without any possibility of further growth.  But there are a few buds that are still alive.  Some are just starting to catch the sun and feed off the light, growing in the direction of openness.  Eventually, the stick will be a thick branch of life.  Heavy with purpose.

I hope that my book will have better punctuation than the scroll the prophesy was written on.

On February 14, 2015, I will give away five copies of the anthology, “Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence.”  All you have to do is use the hashtag #DearSisAntho and tweet how the book will be used for survivors, love, and listening.  I’ll choose the best five tweets, cover shipping, and include a personal hand written note as well.

Submit now through 11:59pm EST February 14th!

My latest. An Op-Ed about progressive politics, “PC culture backlash,” and Chait-gate.

Join in the dialogue for the last 2014 event at Penn Book Center in Philly!

Friday, December 5 6pm

130 S 34th St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104

Contributors: Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Desire Vincent, and Allison McCarthy will be reading!

The last time I blogged I was living in a house, in Cleveland, and resting up from the book tour that took every inch of energy from my bones.

It’s now October.  I’m a month deep into my MFA writing program at Columbia University in New York, and live in an apartment in the Bronx.  Life, how shall I put this in an understated manner, has changed.

So, pardon the lengthy silence.  I was getting my bearings.  Small things: selling a home, finding a home, beginning graduate school, child rearing my five year old, keeping my life partner and I sane in the process.

You’ll find me on here more often, I promise.

Welcome to October.  I usher it in with my gratitude and passion.

I’m starting the MFA program at Columbia University in the fall. Literary Non Fiction. I have no qualms about going back to school, but once I started walking the hallways on a deserted Friday afternoon, the doubts began to echo as my 35 year old body passed by ear budded and beat covered ears, youngish faces with no signs of parental lines of worry. I went to the bathroom to collect my thoughts and found this:

It made me half smile. The rewording/defacing private property is something I would have done ten years ago. Something I would proudly do with my feminist friends, searching for our space in the world, restless to reclaim a corner of a university that has a harrowing record of its treatment toward women.

I feel secure in my age. Signs of age on my face have accompanied the deliverance of wisdom and understanding beyond my 20 something year old self could have imagined. And I am curious to see how this MFA program mixed bag of writers will mesh, in the classroom or the Women’s Womb.