Dear Readers,

I hope your writing is going well this summer.  I hope you’re finding time for it and inspiration for whatever it is you need to write.  Please let me know how this site can help you, and what could inspire you the most. 

Meanwhile, here are some quotes I keep coming back to for inspiration and courage. 

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation.  They deepen  and widen and expand our sense of life: They feed the soul.  When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored.  We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.  It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea.  You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”  – Anne Lamott

“The scariest moment is always just before you start.  After that, things can only get better.”  – Stephen King

“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’’…. And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff.  But I try.  When I’m writing, I write.  And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”  – Maya Angelou

“The way we tell out life story is the way we begin to live our life.”  -Maureen Murdock

“Always, always we were becoming a story.  But I didn’t understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story’s life, would be what would allow me to live.”  – Mark Doty

“I wrote to find beauty and purpose, to know that love is possible and lasting and real, to see day lilies and swimming pools, loyalty and devotion, even though my eyes were closed and all that surrounded me was a darkened room.  I wrote because that was who I was at the core, and if I was too damaged to walk around the block, I was lucky all the same. Once I got to my desk, once I started writing, I still believed anything was possible.”   – Alice Hoffman

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes  everything.”   – Joyce Carol Oates

And my favorite of all:

“Lower your standards and keep writing.”  – William Stafford