For years, my favorite poet has been Billy Collins. I’ve shared his poetry before on this blog. As I’ve helped Lucy write her blog, we’ve warmed up our writing minds with poems from Billy. He helps me engage my heart in a way that isn’t too sentimental or affected. Anyway, today I came across this old poem called Purity and it’s one of my favorites. It’s great advice for writers, too. It’s about coming to the typewriter completely vulnerable. [...]
John Blake at CNN has spent about a year or so on an article that hit CNN.Com today. He was certainly one of the more thoughtful interviews I’ve ever done, if not the most thoughtful. John and I sat down in Atlanta last Christmas, and have talked several times since. I assumed the story got lost, but John kept thinking about it, and mostly he kept thinking about David Gentiles, my old mentor who died last year. John would [...]
While I’m working on another project, my dog Lucy has taken over the blog. I should be back blogging a few times next week. Until then, I’m hoping you and your dogs will enjoy Lucy’s perspective on life.
I can tell by the way Don puts on his socks whether or not he is getting ready for work or whether we are going for a walk. His head is down when he’s getting ready to write. His head is up [...]
You and a friend can win a trip to Portland for the Living a Better Story Seminar. Simply write a blog entry telling us about the kind of story you want to live and how you think the seminar might help. Then submit a link to that blog entry in the comments on this page and you are officially entered. Here’s a video with some more info, then the details of the contest are spelled out below. It looks [...]
The carpets were like grasses and the cold concrete floor was like river rock. The moon through the windows at night was like an alien eye, and the couches were like bounce houses. The plants were like forests, and you could get behind them in the corner by the wall and lay on your back and look up through the canopy out the window and you might as well have been born in a jungle.
There were furry, bouncy, rolling [...]
For the next several blog entries, my dog Lucy will be taking over. She will also be answering questions in the comments. I’ll check back in soon after I’ve completed a project that needs focus. Thanks so much for understanding. Best, Don.
This is how I take a nap
If the kitchen I came from was the world, where Don lived was the cosmos, or bigger than the cosmos, it was all the material that existed and there was no [...]
For the next several blog entries, my dog Lucy will be taking over. She will also be answering questions in the comments. I’ll check back in soon after I’ve completed a project that needs focus. Thanks so much for understanding. Best, Don.
Me at Seven Weeks
I came from a litter of Labs and I was the only brown one. My brothers were all black, and we lived in the woods by waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge. We lived [...]
Lucy Miller
You’ve probably noticed I’ve written fewer blog entries over the last couple weeks. There are a number of reasons for this, including a major project I’m trying to wrap up this summer, and an onslaught of guests traveling through town. All great stuff, but all keeping me from my daily discipline of blogging.
The other day, Lucy, my dog, asked if she could cover the blog for a while. We were at the park and I was [...]
Griffin House and his wife Jane are staying at the house tonight with this song in tow. Man, what an honor. How prophetic. He put it together right about the time Nashville was flooding, and he and some friends shot a video real quick. I think it’s one of those lyrical pictures that will call us back once we are out of this mess. Hopefully we can learn something from our mistakes. Thanks Griffin.
The single is called “Head for [...]
Willie and Lehzan
I’m incredibly humbled by the number of you who have helped us move into the top 50 in the CHASE Bank grant contest currently running on Facebook. Non-profits in the top 200 get 20k from CHASE, and things could certainly change, but we are placing well going into the last week.
I called Dr. Sowers, our The Mentoring Project’s President and asked what the chances were that we could win the whole thing, giving [...]
