Sherry does not write using pen and paper or a computer because that is too hard on her hands. She speaks her writing, and it’s some of my favorite work around.

For the last few years I’ve felt as if I was in some new stage of adoptee life, only I didn’t know what it was. It felt a little like aging woman driving towards a wall with not much hope in her heart. No wonder I wasn’t dating!

I had dinner the other night with an adoptive mom, and when she talked about talking her kids back to their country of origin and spoke of their first moms, I tried to check out as much as possible.

When I was near the end of my time teaching writing at San José State, I had my students, Spartans all, memorize a paragraph from Thoreau’s Walden

If you create space for blessings in your life, what then is not possible?

I invented Write or Die almost ten years ago when I needed money for food.

I have had the sense the last few years that my body, my life, is thinning and the truth of things, of myself, are more transparent to me.

Maybe this was a mistake, is what I am thinking as I stare at my notebook, writing in big letters IF YOU WANT TO TAKE ME DOWN JUST GET IT OVER WITH.

“My mother did not want me.”

I watched two dragonflies smash each other against a branch sticking out of the murky water’s edge the other day, and I’ve been thinking about them ever since.

Up until yesterday late afternoon, the main way I’d fight back tears when I didn’t want to cry was to remember the time my dad fell when we were skating.

Sherry is one of the amazing writers I work with, and, as you will soon hear, she is a force.