Ever watch the TV show Impractical Jokers? It’s a hidden camera show with four lifelong friends who challenge each other to take part in embarrassing situations and showcasing people’s reactions. If you haven’t yet indulged, it is definitely worth a watch! You will laugh, a lot! The four friends (Joe, “Murr”, “Q”, and Sal) met …
Editing is sort of a secret skill. Every book we’ve ever read, every movie we watched, every textbook, description of an art piece, play program… all of them were written, then edited likely over and over again, often by teams of people, until they become the polished work we’re used to. We don’t talk about …
The past six months have been amazing. Anyone who knows me knows that I deplore hyperbole. Nothing is really awesome. Few things are fantastic. And, the amazing only happens once in a while. The past six months have been amazing – on the personal and the publishing fronts. We launched Backchannels Journal January 2019 after …
It’s Pride month! Diversity is an important concept in every system from microbiomes to our society. In the U.S., we used to think it meant “not just white,” which was a start. The dialogue in our country progressed from being ethnically- and racially-minded (I’ll use the race concept since it still holds a lot of …
My mom is a Virgo, which is the perfectionist of the zodiac. Supposedly, Virgos have a perfect version of themselves that they hold in their minds, and they are very self-critical by nature. Growing up in my household, I would have to say that my mom definitely fits these traits of her astrological sign. She …
I really hate writing sometimes. Maybe I should back up. I do love writing, those moments when I can’t not write anymore, after the idea’s been going around and around in my head for too long. After I carried it and it scratched at me while I sorted laundry into piles and decided not to …
“Do I know you?” “I feel like we’ve met before.” “You look exactly like my sister-in-law.” These sentences or some variant of them are words I hear every week. And they are usually followed by the person telling me a story. At the gas pump. In line at the grocery store. After a workshop. I …
This is the part I’m not supposed to say in a grad school or writing job application because it’s too cliché: I’ve been writing stories since I graduated from holding a crayon in my fist. It started with spelling words telling twenty-five sentence tales and progressed to diaries, then contest-winning essays, then songs and poems …
I’ve been writing all my life. I remember my very first “published” piece that was proudly hanging on my grandparents’ wall. I had drawn a series of pictures with captions of a bear going to sleep, though it might have been a large dog (my artistic talents weren’t quite developed at age 6)! When in …