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Author Archives: Mary Sojourner

Look through: Breakthrough for the week of 5/3/2021

By Mary Sojourner on May 3, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

What lies ahead of you? As you consider this question, do you think of all that you think you have to accomplish in the near and far future? And, should you think that, do you decide to click on Netflix or burrow under the covers on your bed, or suddenly have to clean out every drawer… Continue Reading >>>

Evidence and Proof: thanks to Jerry Seinfeld

By Mary Sojourner on April 29, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. – Jerry Seinfeld, comedian Writing is one of the last pieces of evidence that people are still grateful and giving a damn. – Mary Sojourner I write from eighty-one years of life. I write from sixty-nine years of… Continue Reading >>>

The Great Taboo – Grief: Breakthrough Writing for April 2, 2021

By Mary Sojourner on April 2, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

If you have lost a time, a person, a means of knowing yourself – and let others know your grief, you have most likely heard this response: “It is time for you to move on.” Laraine Herring, writer, teacher and loss survivor, would disagree. Her new book, A Constellation of Ghosts is both a fiercely… Continue Reading >>>

Crow Truth: Breakthrough for the week of March 29, 2021

By Mary Sojourner on March 30, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over. —Neil Gaiman Tell us a lie. Tell us a lie about your truth. Shape what isn’t into what is. Don’t tell… Continue Reading >>>

You don’t have Forever; and you may have it easy: Breakthrough for the week of 2/22/2021

By Mary Sojourner on February 25, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

I don’t work – and “work” is the operative concept – on my new novel. I edit. I look at the photos of much younger writers reviewed in main-stream media and want nothing more than to finish off the salted caramel ice cream in the freezer. Or go for a walk. Or watch yet another… Continue Reading >>>

Plagued: Breakthrough Writing for the week of 2/8/2021

By Mary Sojourner on February 9, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

You give into distraction as if it is a murderer; you lie there, waiting to be killed Today: fight for your life. —-Miranda July I have avoided writing about the Corona virus – in the same way that I almost never wrote about Donald Trump. I have believed that both pathogens have been treated in… Continue Reading >>>

Give-away:Breakthrough for the week of 1/25/2020

By Mary Sojourner on January 25, 2021 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

So it went, with safety, the more you guarded, the less you had. —Richard Powers I once walked along a placid river in a placid town. I was anything but placid. I had lost much, not the least of which was the mountain town that had once seemed an ordinary paradise. I walked along the… Continue Reading >>>

Forget resolutions; forget “hope”: Breakthrough writing for the week of 12/28/2020

By Mary Sojourner on December 28, 2020 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week, Fort Slaughter: a novel of ruin and desire.

She is on familiar ground – and not. She has lived near this forest long enough to know how to move in and through it. She sees what she has been looking for. It is her husband – and not. Chera Hammons’ novel, Monarchs of the Northeast Kingdom, is a harsh – and wonderfully written –… Continue Reading >>>

Ending/Conjunction/Beginning: Breakthrough for the week of 12/21/2020

By Mary Sojourner on December 21, 2020 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

Form serves us best when it works as an obstruction to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The… Continue Reading >>>

Interactions of great and ordinary consequence: Breakthrough for now and the unknowable future

By Mary Sojourner on December 12, 2020 in Breakthrough Tip of the Week.

For all of you, especially Gabe and Lynette I don’t know how anybody does anything these days. You’re right about COVID. It feels like a fugue state. I’m tired and uninspired, and realizing the importance of all of those seemingly inconsequential interactions that made life exciting or interesting or upsetting or frustrating, like a conversation… Continue Reading >>>