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Last week one of my students came to class with the horrifying news that the previous evening she had arrived home to find fire trucks in the parking lot, trying to control a fire in the apartment directly above hers. She came to class because, she said, “I need something to do to keep my mind off the horror! I had to be here!” Fortunately the fire was contained before it destroyed her unit. A week later her apartment and belongings are being treated for smoke damage. She still has not been able to spend more than a few minutes at a time in the apartment and has been unable to determine whether her computer works or not. Fortunately the story she had written for class last week was stored on her work computer. We all have our fingers crossed that the contents of her home hard drive will be intact. You never know when a fire will start. You never know when a thief will come. You never know when a hard drive will die. Are your files backed up? Are your really important files backed up ou...

Travel, especially foreign travel, is a great way to broaden your horizons and enrich your life. I’ve been especially fortunate to have the opportunity over the last twenty years to visit every continent except Australia, and have all sorts of great stories to tell of my experiences. One of the best way’s I’ve found to keep these memories from fading is to write about them, but when I am constantly barraged by one spectacular sight after another, ongoing connections with fascinating people, and an endless stream of unfamiliar surroundings, it all blurs together, even before I get home. I’ve often begun a trip with a fresh notebook in hand, intending to journal events on a daily basis. Once I managed to do this for five whole days. I can use precious time to immerse myself in the adventure, sleep, or journal. The bottom priority never gets done! Our recent trip to China went much better in this respect, because I used multiple streams of input to record experiences rather than relying o...

“Where do you start?” “How do you start?” These may be the two most common questions people ask, specifically about writing their life story, but the questions apply to any type of writing project. You start by writing, and you start anywhere. Start with the first thought that comes to mind. Write about that and keep writing. If you can’t think of anything else to write about, write about not knowing where to start, and keep writing. Words will begin to flow, and a story will slowly take shape. One word, one thought, will lead to another. I can’t credit a specific source for those words, they are universal, but Anne Lamott and Natalie Goldberg come to mind. Anne mentions this concept continually in her classic, Bird by Bird , and Natalie hits on it regularly as she develops the concept of Writing Practice in her best-selling series of books about writing: Writing Down the Bones , Wild Mind , and Old Friend from Far Away . Last week I found this concept of just starting — anywhere at a...

Most apartment buildings in China have balconies, and a large percentage of the balconies we saw were decorated with drying laundry. I was fascinated at the diversity and universality of these displays, and followed the urge to snap many photos, a few of which are included in the slideshow above. As I stared at building after building decorated with drying dainties, I wondered how long it will be before America adopts something similar. How long will it be before snooty neighborhoods that don’t allow yards to be marred with such plebian amenities as clotheslines change their thinking? How long will it be before clothespin sales hit record levels, as bicycles sales are already doing? I was reminded of our visit to Ireland a couple of years ago. All the B&Bs we stayed in featured clotheslines in the yard, and most were in use. One hostess explained Ireland’s rate system for electricity. Initial costs remain low, to enable families to heat their homes, cook their food, and light a few...

Shanghai skyline from bus crossing bridge Shanghai riverside park My face is red. I misspoke and must set the record straight. As you can see from the two photos above, the skies are not always white in China as reported in my last post . Flipping through some of the thousands of photos I took on our trip, specifically to find pictures of some of the stunningly beautiful high-rise architecture we saw (my title for the trip is China: Under Construction), I was shocked to see several consecutive pictures taken in Shanghai that featured blue sky. At first I thought that was caused slightly tinted bus windows, as in the first shot, but the second one was shot in the open air around noon. How could that happen? How could I fail to remember the mild sunburn I got that day as we walked through a park and along the streets of a part of town that has been preserved as a living, fully functional museum of a historic Shanghai shopping district? I share this story with you for three primary reason...

Any three-year-old child will tell you, the sky is blue. That’s one of the fundamental truths in life. Even on a cloudy day, you know that blue sky lies above the clouds, soon to return. Blue sky, green grass, white snow, clear air. These are constants you can count on. Unless you live in China. Maybe other places in Asia too, but China is the one I know about. In China the sky is white. So is the air. Not white like snow, but white like pearl dust. I’d heard about the air quality problems in China, and I expected to find nasty brown air when I stepped off the plane in Beijing last month. Imagine my surprise at finding pearly, milky mist, not the sinister, visibly toxic smog I had anticipated. Perhaps this is just an anomaly, I thought. Perhaps tomorrow the mist will clear. But it didn’t. It varied in brightness and luminosity, and we had occasional rain, but it never cleared. The same conditions prevailed in Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chongqin, and Guilin. They remained constant out i...