Every Friday, I post a link to a blog post, sometimes written by one of my fellow bloggers at Patheos, a web portal devoted to religion and spirituality, and sometimes by another blogger whose work I admire. I encourage my blog readers to click through to read these posts, comment, and if you like what you read, follow these bloggers as well. Writer Alison Hodgson appeared on my blog earlier this week with her apt reflection on the precipitous mood... Read more
It’s been a busy week of speaking engagements for me—one radio interview, one TV interview, and three talks, at the Yale Medical Library, my church women’s group, and my son’s kindergarten. My kids have the privilege of attending a school where the arts, particularly creative writing, are a big focus. This year, each kindergarten student is writing his or her own book, which will be bound and presented at an author signing event at our local Barnes and Noble. (I’d... Read more
Blogging provides writers like me with lots of opportunities—to publish and reach audiences without going through lengthy (and often demoralizing!) editorial selection processes, to market books, to test new ideas that might later become a full-fledged article or book. But the blogosphere can be a difficult and frustrating workplace as well, for lots of reasons. As I mentioned in my post several weeks ago about the “tyranny of the news hook,” I sometimes grieve how disposable my blog posts can... Read more
(Originally published on April 1, 2010 on my former blog, Five Dollars and Some Common Sense.) My 10-year-old daughter Leah and I are spending two days in the hospital. Leah and I both have a bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta, which causes brittle bones. Because Leah has had several bad fractures this year requiring surgery, we put her back on a medication protocol she was on as a preschooler, and that (we think) contributed to a nearly four-year stretch when... Read more
For the epigraph in my book No Easy Choice, I chose a stanza from Wendell Berry’s poem “The Way of Pain,” and titled the final chapter using one line from that stanza: “The only way is hard.” In that chapter, I wrote: It’s hard to cope with infertility or the harsh realities of genetic disease. It’s hard to go through emotionally, physically, financially, and morally strenuous procedures such as IVF and PGD. It’s hard to forgo those procedures and the... Read more
I’m still on something of a blogging break, though I hope to be back to five-day-a-week blogging shortly. It has been a very full week, with speaking engagements at Yale Medical School and my son’s kindergarten class (yes, my job is very fun, and eclectic!…I’ll post something about the kindergarten gig next week), a radio interview (will post links next week when it airs), and all three children sick, on different days, so that I’ve had at least one child... Read more
I woke up yesterday feeling surrounded. Put upon. Up to my eyeballs in shhh…tuff. In a right good muddle. The muddle consists of money worries and health worries and work worries. And the continually shifting weight of the professional writer’s emotional life, as I am pulled every which way by excitement and self-pity and confidence and envy, one after the other, sometimes all at once. There are taxes to file, e-mails to answer, guest posts to write, groceries to buy,... Read more
I’m taking a short blogging hiatus (for the rest of this week, possibly into next week) to devote time to some other pressing work. I owe blog posts and essays to several people, I haven’t yet filed my taxes, and my bathrooms are really dirty. Plus it’s parent-teacher conference week at my kids’ schools, which means they get out of school a full two hours early. Yippee. I mean, YIPPEE!!!! If you are new to the blog and want to... Read more
Every Friday, I post a link to a blog post written by one of my fellow bloggers at Patheos, a web portal devoted to religion and spirituality. I encourage my blog readers to click through to read these posts, comment, and if you like what you read, follow these bloggers as well. Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a movie opening this weekend? A little something called The Hunger Games? I admit it. I’m caught up in the hype. My daughter Leah... Read more
Spring has fully sprung here in Connecticut. I am a New Englander at heart who feels a bit cheated by the seasons this year. Our worst snowstorm came in October (and it was a doozy, knocking out power to our entire town for more than a week), after which we had a wimpy, coldish but not really that cold, nearly snowless winter. Now, we seem to have skipped spring and gone straight to summer. I’ve been working with my windows... Read more
Ellen Painter Dollar
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