So many people want to write some version of their life story and, even though it's something they lived, something they know, they can't do it.

I created six groups of three adopted people and gave them ten minutes to act like one brain and come up with a list of what they believed were the negative messages …

I was trying to figure out how to turn the air conditioner on with my key fob so I could leave Bird in the car while I ran in to grab some things

1. My helmet cost over $400. I thought the price was a code. Remember when candy bars were a quarter?

2. 2. The love I had for horses as a kid has been replaced by fear.

When my daughter Keats was a little girl, she and I went to 4th Street in Berkeley one day to get away from the Los Gatos heat and to do a little don't-really-have-money-but-we-can-look shopping.

Someone got a macro lens and is seeing the world--bugs and flying creatures you might tend to swat–like a person deeply in love. Maybe not like a person.

When I first left home at 18 to go to college, I was back home within a year. When I left again, and then again, and then again to go to college, I kept coming home.

I've been living in my childhood town now for two years, and in a month or so I'll pack up and go back to California.

When a student warns me ahead of time, "Sorry this is so angry," I feel excited. Something real is about to happen.

Someone wrote to me that things were bad, really bad. Not only had he been hurt on his job, but when he went back he saw how terrible the working conditions really were, and so he quit.

On Tuesday in our weekly group writing class, Anne talked about how she’d had, for a lack of a better word, writer's block after the death of her adoptive dad.

To be both one thing and another thing at the same time inherently takes more energy that being just one thing.