I ran home during lunch today, and waiting for me at the front desk of my building was a large, flat package.  Seeing Bud bring it to the counter, my brain raced, trying to figure out what it was.  A very wide, thin book?  Something Scott ordered?  As soon as I caught the return address, […]

Last Friday afternoon, I got a call from the Library at St. Joe’s.  They were calling to say that the bound copies of my thesis were in.  This afternoon I drove over to pick them up.  It was strange to be back on campus, mostly because I didn’t feel much in the way of missing […]

Around 2:30 pm yesterday, I suddenly stumbled into a period where I couldn’t cope.  Where everything converged and I truly felt like I might fall apart.  Within half an hour I found out that my great-aunt was in the hospital and that a job application process I’ve been in hit a stumbling block.  I couldn’t […]

Tonight I attended the very last class of my grad school career.  It was sort of anticlimactic, being that I haven’t really loved this class and have been anxiously awaiting it’s end.  I still have one more paper to write for it, but then I’m home free.  The thesis is all but done, save some […]

Apartment 2024 is smelling appealingly of cloves and orange oils right at the moment because I took a brief break this morning from the nearly-finished thesis to make a pomander ball.  There was something soothingly mindless about making rows with cloves in the skin of an orange that gave me a much-needed break from words, […]

I spent Thursday evening and all of Friday writing, holed up in a little cabin out in Aston, PA, at a retreat center run by an order of Franciscan nuns.  I wrote recipes and stories and managed to chug out nearly thirty pages of text, which brings me within 9 pages of the necessary 75.  […]

I met with my thesis adviser on Friday morning.  She invited me to come to her new house in Fishtown, but I sorely underestimated the time it would take to get up there and so was nearly half an hour late (I did call to say I was running behind).  Not exactly the best way […]

I’ve discovered something about my writing process lately which is that if I can’t see it, I can’t write it.  So much of my writing is about evoking a feeling of time and place, of creating moments that are described with unusual details in order to make them feel both totally personal and universal.  But […]

I had a thesis deadline last week and when it came around, I was unprepared.  For some reason I have been wholy unable to connect with the creative detail-aware side of myself from which most of my writing comes from.  I’ve kept on posting at Slashfood, because that writing rarely needs to tap deeper resources, […]

I’m in the midst of writing my masters thesis right now.  It’s a rambling collection of essays about one of my great loves, cooking paraphernalia.  I’ve always been attracted to the tools of cooking, even before I was allowed to turn the stove on by myself.  When I was seven, my grandmother gave me a […]