Category: Life
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Why ‘Food Rules’ is Awesome, Part 2
I posted earlier this week about Food Rules, a book by Michael Pollan that offers 83 basic “rules” on what and how to eat for a healthier life. That post focused on the message and what I came away with. This post focuses on the book’s medium. What do I mean by ‘medium’? I mean […]
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Forum Friday: Islands and Worlds
You may have heard the famous John Donne quote, No man is an island. And yet, another great poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, says this: For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself. Can’t be an island. Must be a world. […]
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A Crumb on Food
If you’ve glanced at my Goodreads box lately, you may have noticed the addition of a book called Food Rules by Michael Pollan. It is a brilliant, brilliant collection: so much so that I intend to write an entirely different post on the book itself and the medium it’s presented in. This post harkens more […]
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Writers: Are we all a bit mad?
I remember the ill-slept, thrilling and simultaneously stomach-turning first morning of Assistant Language Teacher orientation in Japan. It was then a lovely English girl asked the breakfast table, “Are we all a bit mad?” No one had slept well. But it wasn’t just jet lag. I can’t tell you how ridiculously torturous that first night […]
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No Doubles
When I was younger, I used to think that the world was SO big and there were SO many people in it that, by default, there must be hundreds, maybe thousands of people like me. I don’t know that I thought of these people as look-alikes, but I do remember thinking that somewhere– perhaps in […]
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And the first rule of writing on the computer IS:
If you have never seen this before, you may find some context helpful:
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Sometimes I am overwhelmed with fascination
Some mornings and some nights, I don’t know what it is– there’s just this feeling that gets into me. I might describe it like going outside after dark and stopping what you’re doing to draw in the world around you: the crickets, the owls, the velvet blue sky, lady moon, the wind in the trees, […]
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Affirmation for the Artist
Since I decided to pursue my dream of being an author, a number of revelations have occurred to me. The one I want to share today is this: that as writers, artists, musicians, and other independents (at least in the vocational sense)– especially unpublished, un-commissioned, and struggling ones– our affirmation comes largely from within; and […]
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In Awe of Libraries
In search of material on obsessive-compulsive disorder, death and grieving, and Leonardo da Vinci– all potential story fodder– I made a trip to my local library. There, clutching a scrap of paper with a few call numbers I’d penciled down on it as I traced the books to which they belonged, I stopped amongst the […]
Julie Israel 