Someone asked us the other day if we’d do another writing workshop. Fia & I split the difference about whether that’d be a good idea. So, I sat down to do one of those classic pro vs con charts, thinking that might convince her…

Nothing came immediately to mind, so instead I gathered up everything I know that I might be able to pass on in a workshop…

I started drawing in my notebook, figuring I’d make some sort of sense of it as I went. This is what came out. Based on everything I’ve noticed lately when I write.

(I’m currently thinking that a writing workshop isn’t possible, given this chart. HA.)

with love, brian

The thing I’ve come to see about stories after a very long time of listeninglookingwritingreadingtelling them is that they’re alive. They’re not objects, like a snow globe on your shelf, or a favorite sweater.

As I look around the room where I write this, there’s nothing I see that’s not alive. It may not seem that way at first glance to you, who does not know that we found the wood of the bookcase stacked in an open field in Montana on a late winter day. Who has no recollection of running their fingers over the velvet surface of the blue bowl we found hidden behind a children’s book in a little shop by the sea.

It is that way with everything here. Each piece holds a living story cupped in its hands & even if you cannot hear it, or if you move too quickly through the world to notice, the stories are the weave, the warp & weft that wrap around us all.

The easy thing is to think that you have nothing in common with people whose lives are very different from your own. But that only lasts until we start to hear the stories that surround them & hold them safe.

It is how it is with living things. Until you’ve had a private conversation with each other as the night settles in, you have no real idea of how it is to be them. You’re unable to see the world they inhabit is a gift & a reminder of the mystery at the center of every living thing.

with love, brian

[This is an excerpt from my notebook. It’s about things I think are true, with enough other things that could go either way that I can’t really recommend it to anyone who’s currently questioning the nature of reality.]

As you can see, I have three different kinds of handwriting. It all started when I lived in LA & I went to see a semi-famous psychic. She…

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We are just now kind of sort of catching up with ourselves around here...

Maybe that’s true. Or maybe it just feels that way because here on Cape the rain has stopped (for a bit) and all sorts of green and yellow and purple and white living things are popping up out of the ground, preening for the sun.

And that feels really hopeful. (I’m a sucker for pere…

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“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because my liberation is bound up in yours, then let us work together.”​

​Dr. Lilla Watson​

[March is Women’s History Month - in celebration of this, every day throughout the month, we pair one of the Flying Edna stories with words spoken by women. These are women who, for one r…

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One of my favorite parts of this drawing is the wagon (unpacking a lot of this requires figuring out why you packed it all in the first place)...

Because, often, when I’m finally able to unpack a past, tangled experience & see it in a new light, I’ll think Well, that was silly...
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Silly that I used so much time & energy over the years trying to figure it …

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we begin with “vert” - Latin for “to turn to - & then we consider the things in the natural world that we turn to when we need to refresh, refuel, rebalance... we lightly refer to this series as our “verts”. scientifically unproven & perfectly plausible (because extrovert & introvert are simply not enough...)
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Fia Skye. From the intro…

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joy cookie...

A while back, Fia asked me about my favorite kind of cookies. My reply took about a nanosecond.

Oatmeal gumdrop cookies, I said.

She shook her head. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of those, she said.

You grew up in the Midwest, I said. Gumdrop cookies w…

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these moments...

I had an aesthetics professor in college who would sit quietly (except for tapping his pen on the table when he wanted things to move along...:-)) in faculty critiques of our work. When it came time to comment, he’d often say only this one thing:

If you cannot explain it simply, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

It was a brutall…

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#3 is my favorite...;-)

Lately, I just roll my eyes when I see list articles. You know the ones. They’re everywhere, from mainstream newspapers & magazines to the Wild West of social media.

Top Six Things You Need To Know About The Foods That Famous People Eat. Or Top Nine Reasons People Have Different Opinions Than You. Or Three Facts That Will Change …

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Like so many folks around here in New England, we are still feet deep in snow drifts. The weather has “warmed” - this is a relative term of course - but it will take a hefty, consistent dose of warming sun to melt through the sheer mass.

With a 9 month old collie pup, we found out rather quickly we needed to figure out a way for her to safely be outside.…

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A few days ago, I decided it was time to get back to my stretches. The only problem had was that our lives are arranged lately in small bursts. Morning coffee. Short conversations in between walks for Koko. Zipping to the store for fresh kale (with only the teeniest bit of suffering about it on my part. Which seems to be part of my personal journey that…

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I was flipping through 'songs of starlight' yesterday & this story jumped out at me. (Which means it was basically squinting its eyes at me a little bit & asking if I'd forgotten anything important, hmm? HA.

Something in me unwound a little bit. Mainly because being right takes a lot of effort & even more effort when it turns out you weren't actually rig…

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