It isn’t going to be easy and every day will be a struggle. Maybe not a physical fight to survive but certainly a psychological one. Some days you will do battle just to be happy. From time to time you will even look back and think dying would have been easier. Read more…
While the rest of the East Coast was waiting out (or wading out from under) Hurricane Sandy, I was learning how to be a better writer. I also learned one indie author’s secret to selling a million e-books in a year. The lessons came from some women who have perfected Read more…
In January, my friend Sheila and I went to Mexico for our mutual friend Olga’s wedding. We knew a little Spanish, but not much. An hour after our plane landed, we got into a car with two men, strangers we had never met, and began a one-hour journey to our Read more…
This morning I woke up from a dream in which I was trying to find a colorful clause to go with the verb “giggled,” as in “like a little girl.” That’s what happens when you go to a writing workshop taught by Jim Minick, author of several books, including The Read more…
If you happen to be in Bellefonte, Pa., today to show support for the Penn State victims–or for Gerald Sandusky’s preliminary hearing–and you see a blonde woman carting a satchel of books, it’s me. I’m not lukewarm, but am either hot or cold: sometimes I take days or weeks to Read more…
Having waited more than 20 years to hear Maya Angelou speak, I was not disappointed when she appeared at West Virginia University Friday night. I doubt the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, among many other books, knows how to disappoint. I was a little surprised she Read more…
The thing about working for the media is, you sometimes take all the “glitz” that goes with it for granted: tight security, rubbing shoulders with celebrities, or gaining access when other people can’t. But when you change places, you tend to notice these things. Or at least I did, when Read more…
It’s a First Amendment matter, really, when you get right down to it. But it’s also a sign of something that is sorely lacking in our society: The ability to call a spade a spade. I think Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. said it first, when he wrote that Read more…
Journalists were in the hot seat about two months ago, when national headlines made a coal mining tragedy here in West Virginia much worse. Everyone knows that. But what many people may not know is that some of those journalists came to Morgantown six weeks after the Sago Mine disaster, Read more…
NOTE: A portion of this was broadcast on WVPB on January 10, the day family and friends buried Sago miner and Newburg resident Terry Helms. When I went to bed just before 2 a.m. on January 4, I thought that 12 coal miners trapped beneath the earth in a town Read more…