Raymond Carver:

Why not just tell the truth?

Mary Pipher:

Yet, paradoxically, our discouragement can be the very impetus that motivates us to write. We may feel the need to be that voice crying out in the wilderness. We may feel compelled to shout "Fire!" or "Man overboard!" or simply "The emperor has no clothes!"

Writing to Change the World, p. 29

Anton Chekhov:

A book ought to be an ax to break the frozen sea within us.

William Stafford:

The exhilaration of discovery, the variety that comes as a result of being yourself -- these benefits are so important and so effective that they bring results that are truly original, more exploratory and satisfactory by far than the "competing-with-models" formula.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 78

Marcel Proust:

The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new places, but in seeing with new eyes.

Anne Lamott:

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding.

Bird by Bird, p. 232

Winning Haiku Featured on Nashville Blog

Amy's winning tomato haiku is featured on the Nashville Scene's Bites blog.

Mary Pipher:

Any form of writing can change the world. Your goal is to find the form that allows you to use every one of your talents in the service of what you consider to be your most important goals. You want to search for what you alone can say and then how you can say it most effectively.

Writing to Change the World, p. 27

Daniel J. Boorstin:

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of knowledge.

Charles Baxter:

Feelings of inadequacy are the black lung disease of writing.

William Stafford:

The only real poems are found poems -- found when we stumble on things around us.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 67-68

Amy Named Haiku Contest Winner

Amy was named the winner of Nashville's Tomato Art Fest's Hot Tomato Haiku Contest's "Plum Humorous" category. Three Belmont University English professors judged the over 400 contest entries. Amy read her winning haiku on the main stage at today's festival following the announcement of her winning status.

Malcolm Forbes:

The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

Anne Lamott:

You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible.

Bird by Bird, p. 231

Mary Pipher:

By definition, writers are people who care enough to try to share their ideas with other people. We are not passive, or utterly cynical, because then we would not even bother. We have a deep yearning to connect, to write things down and pass them around.

Writing to Change the World, p. 8

Ernest Hemingway:

If a writer stops observing he is finished. Experience is communicated by small details intimately observed.

William Stafford:

But to live your writing life by assuming that certain "norms" have been established and thereby made operative for any writer -- such a stance reverses the actual: writers recognize opportunities...Norms are for talking about art; opportunities are for artists.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 53-54