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Despite having written hundreds of poems, over the past decade I’ve kept poetry at arm’s length. It’s still within my reach, should I choose to try writing verse again. But without the benefit of daily practice, I haven’t been able to return to the craft with much enthusiasm. I’ve long reserved poetry as a means…
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I awoke at midnight from a nightmare monochrome world entirely drained of color, my identity violently stripped away by some unseen force. When I finally awoke from this overwhelming level of fright, I found myself gasping for air. After I finally found my breath, it occurred to me that the nightmare was a reflection of…
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You may not think your own life story is all that interesting. But, what matters most in storytelling is how your story is told. It’s not so much the content, but rather the presentation. The point of view is also key. Both biographical and autobiographical stories are told with some inherent bias or deficiency on…
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Once, I wandered a crooked path through the twilight of mediocrity. It wasn’t a choice I made myself, but seemingly one that I inherited as a member of a lower middle-class family. My station in life seemed signed, sealed, and delivered, then neatly folded into a filing cabinet beside the birth certificate that called me…
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It’s been said many times that the blank page is like a canvas. Frankly, a blank page is much more like a desert. It can be the most dreaded thing for any writer to face, being vast, empty, and seemingly infinite. Ironically, it’s what a writer faces all the time. When you set yourself to…
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Today’s educational paradigm of oversimplification has caused intellectuals such as myself a great deal of grief. The lure of simplicity is the crux upon which knowledge today is distilled down to something palatable. But to take simplification to the extent of pacifying the lowest common denominator is an elixir for comfortable complacency which we often…
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I grew up in the golden age of blogging, that glorious time when you could scribble a few thoughts on the internet, hit ‘publish,’ and suddenly find yourself the authority on just about anything you please. Yeah, I remember those days fondly. Back then, the most intense competition was between you and that one overly…
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Every so often, we find ourselves at moments of sudden clarity. Unfortunately, most of us dismiss them while being distracted by things of the moment, or categorizing them as inconvenient truths we’d prefer to ignore. For whatever reason, I find these moments come at almost regular intervals for me. Perhaps it’s because I consciously partake…
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Everything looks different in the dark, and because of that, you think differently, too. It’s why for many years night drives became my primary source of inspiration. Many night drives made up much of my time that I lived in the state of Colorado. Naturally, it’s a beautiful place; generally, the people aren’t that bad,…
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Every once in a while, I need to renew my dedication to writing. It’s a curious ritual that I find myself performing every year, a self-imposed checkpoint in my writing journey. I’m sure many writers do this, perhaps with varying frequency or intensity. For me, I find that about every year, I need to refocus…