I love starting my sentences with the word “and”. But there’s some grammar rule that goes like this: Thou shall not start your sentences with “and”. Oh, really? So you can imagine my disbelief when I heard an English professor say, You can start a sentence with the word “and”. Me: You can?! How did […]
How many times to do we have to hear advice until we follow it? Are you guilty of knowing what is good for you but not doing it? Or knowing the right thing to do and not acting on it? Over the past couple of years, I’ve read a variety of texts ranging from short […]
How do you become a better writer today without taking classes for an MFA in creative writing? To improve your writing, all you have to do is pay close attention to the texts you read: your favorite book, the article you found online, or the advertisements you see on a daily basis. All it comes […]
To complement a short story that I read yesterday, the rain kept pouring and Youtube decided to play the songs of an Italian pianist and composer named Ludovico Einaudi. I have a collection of literature books that I have kept myself from donating because those things were expensive. I haven’t read every single text in […]
Being a reader does not mean that you have to read all of the classics like Don Quixote or The Great Gatsby. It took me a long time to understand and accept this. I agree that it helps to read the classics to understand the references made to them and to gain insight on what […]
When I was in high school, a teacher assigned a project in which we could only pick one career as our topic. One of my classmates asked her what she should do if she had three careers in mind. For the sake of the project, the teacher told her that she could choose only one […]
In her poem “Little Things,” Sharon Olds writes, I am doing something I learned early to do, I am / paying attention to small beauties, / whatever I have–as it were our duty / to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world. Like Olds, Mary Oliver’s poems teach me to pay attention […]
I share poetry lines that move me and why they move me in this poetry series called “These Lines.” I am still reading The Carrying by Ada Limon, so lines from her poems made it to this series again. I hate the world, the pain of it that circles in us, that makes us […]
I was standing in front of an arrangement of roses with my uncle. We’d been in the dining room when I asked him if he had a simple piece of advice for me to find inner peace. When we stood in front of these flowers, he started telling me something important about the reason flowers […]