Category: What I’m Writing

(December 2025)

A Holiday Poem​
​

I’m neck deep in writing curriculum for my winter semester, so I thought I would share a poem I wrote a few years ago about the holidays.

Fair warning: it’s not snowflakes and sleigh rides and all things magical.

I don’t know when December and the Christmas season lost some of its luster for me. Perhaps it’s the overly busy schedule or the myopic perspective on gift giving. Maybe it’s the cloudy dates and the increasing darkness.

Every year, at this time, I wish for one thing: a simple Christmas. With no noise or lights or activities or stuff.

Forgive the cynical tone of the poem. But maybe some of the phrases will resonate with you. (And when you’re done, listen to Bing Crosby’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”)

​

A Lament for Christmas

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I was too busy at church

with the preparation of food

for the shared holiday meal

(I brought a bagged salad but don’t tell anyone)

and the donating of presents

and the writing of cards for the shut ins

and rehearsing the Christmas program for hours and hours

softening my “r” s until “Lord” sounds “Lawd”

and the entire chorus crescendos appropriately

to the forte news that your son is born.

​

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I was at the multitudes of holiday parties

which celebrate Hannukah and Christmas

and Xmas and Kwanzaa and nothing at all

(if that is your thing)

consuming chocolate and cheese and lots of small foods on sticks

and wine and beer and hard liquor

and even champagne

(even though it’s not New Year’s Eve yet).

​

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I was purchasing gifts

you see, I cut short our reserved day of thanksgiving

to push and shove in order to begin collecting gifts

to give to teachers and non-teachers,

to leaders and non-leaders

(I can’t even tell who is who anymore)

but I am proud to announce that I have purchased

dozens of perfect gifts, and dozens more of non-perfect gifts

and an innumerable amount of gift cards,

joyfully announcing to those who receive them:
“Jesus is born! Here—have some plastic.”

​

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I was at the local school,

I was dropping off items for their Christmas donation pajama drive

and food drive

and toy drive

and ziploc baggie drive

(because everyone should have ziploc baggies this time of year)​
and the school Christmas program

(which, for the record, is different from the church program and yet very much the same)

I was prepping snacks for classroom celebrations

(because pretzels and popcorn and M&Ms are somehow directly tied to religious celebrations)

and making meals for support staff brunches

and covering playground duty

so that teachers could attend their own lunchtime Christmas party

(which, for the record, is completely different from the company parties and not at all the same).

​

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I was sitting on Santa’s lap

(which is a bit embarrassing to admit)

I wasn’t going to do it, but he was there

and I really just wanted to vocalize to someone

what I really wanted for Christmas

(portable technology or at the very least a gift card to purchase what I want)

I was participating in the gingerbread house contest (third place, thank you very much)

and riding the Santa train to who-knows-where

and sending Christmas cards to every address imaginable

(scalloped edges and matte finish, of course)

and starting every morning consuming a chocolate from my advent calendar

(the wine and cheese calendars sold out before I could get one)

and ending each evening pushing my own curfew in order to

watch every single Hallmark holiday movie

what does this have to do with the birth of your son, you ask?

no one seems to know, but frankly, no one seems to care.

​

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord

I didn’t get to hug Mary or fist bump Joseph

I didn’t get to smell baby Jesus

(because you know even the Son of God must have had that wonderful new baby smell)

I didn’t get to take in the simple complexity

of diety in the flesh, of unfathomable greatness in the smallest of humans

I didn’t get to “go tell it on the mountains” with the shepherds

that “Jesus Christ was born,”

not because it was an evite requiring my RSVP

but because, in the stillness of the moment was joy

True

Joy

“joy to the world” kind of joy

and the response to that joy

was adoration

and excitement

and jubilation

that can only come from those who were there.

​

But I didn’t get to experience that

because

I wasn’t at the stable, Lord.

November 2025

---

Revising: My First Chapters

If given the choice, I’d probably rather scrub toilets or give my dog a bath than sit down to rework a chapter. And yet here I am, writing about revision… mostly as a way to delay doing it.

Why? Because revision is hard.

I tell my students this all the time. I hear it from other writers. And I feel it in my own work whenever I’m told, “This isn’t quite working—you’ll need to revise.”

Why is revision so difficult? Part of it is that writing is personal; we’ve poured our heart into those words. To hear they need to be changed feels a little like being told we need to be changed. Another part is that many of us put our best effort into a first draft, which makes it hard to imagine how to make our best even better. And sometimes we’re just told, “Revise,” without any clear sense of what or why, which can leave us feeling like lost hikers with no trail map.

Because of all this, I devote my EN101 semester to revision. I believe it’s one of the most important writing skills my students can carry with them. Far beyond college papers. Honestly, it’s easier to teach it to others (and sometimes more fun, especially when I pull out Play-Doh for middle schoolers) than to face revision myself.

But I’m not as opposed to it as I once was. In fact, I’ve learned to embrace feedback as a tool for growth. Back in January, I received comments from eight Beta Readers. Their insights guided four solid weeks of revision on my manuscript, and my writing was better for it.

Now, almost a year later, I’m hearing back from agents. More than a few have told me my query letter and story concept are “intriguing.” But those same agents have also said the first pages of my manuscript feel “underwhelming.”

That’s feedback worth paying attention to.

So here I am again, staring down the daunting task of re-seeing my opening chapters, imagining new ways to pull a reader into the world of my story. It feels big. It feels exhausting. But it also feels necessary. Because being a writer means committing to the whole process, both the parts we love and the parts we’d rather avoid.

So I take a deep breath. I remind myself of what I tell my students. And I open the manuscript.

If I can do my hard thing today, then so can you. Revision may never stop being hard. But maybe that’s the point. Hard isn’t bad. Hard is where growth begins.

We can do hard things together.

---

(September 2025)

---

Author Visits

The world of author visits is still pretty new to me. I haven’t even been doing them for a full year yet, so it feels like a muscle I’m still learning to stretch.

Maybe that’s because I’m not “technically” an author yet—not in the published, books-on-the-shelf sense of the word. But when a friend in the literary publishing world first suggested school visits as a way to build my author platform, it just made sense. Unlike adult authors, who can lean on social media or book tours, middle grade and younger readers don’t buy their own books or follow writers online. They read what’s put in their hands by parents, teachers, and especially librarians.

That’s where author visits come in. My friend told me: librarians should become my new best friends. They are the ones who hold the keys to the literary kingdom. They select which books go on the shelves, and even which books are prominently displayed on the tops of the bookshelves.

At first, I thought of visits as a future marketing strategy. But with more than 25 years in education behind me, I figured I’d at least feel at home in a classroom.

What I didn’t expect was just how much I’d love it.

Let me paint it to you this way: doing an author visit is a bit like being a grandparent. You get to walk in, bring the fun, hopefully win the kids over…and walk out. No report cards, no conferences, not even state standards. I teach what I want how I want. Some days I even get to let the students play with playdoh (one of my favorite revision lessons).

So that’s what is keeping me busy these days. I’m creating one-and-done lesson plans, hoping to inspire students and give them one more writing tool that they maybe didn’t previously own in their toolbox. And I give teachers a break, albeit a tiny one.

What started as a professional “should” has turned into one of the biggest joys in my schedule. My computer is crammed with Google slides for a handful of upcoming school visits, and my playdoh is packed and ready.

Let’s go.

(If I haven’t been to your classroom yet–why not? Let’s set a date! Go to my website and message me)

---

(September 2025)

---

So, the end of August rolled in, and I sat down to map out the usual rhythms of my September newsletter. Week one? That one always writes itself—it’s what I’ve been reading lately. Week four? That’s reserved for a wild-card writing prompt or a quick Google search for something fun. Week three is my favorite—I get to share whatever thoughts are bouncing around in my head (and let’s be honest, I always have a few). But week two? The “what I’m writing” week? This month, it stopped me in my tracks.

Because the truth is—I haven’t been writing. Not really. Not unless you count emails, grocery lists, or the ever-growing sticky note in my planner labeled “things I should be writing but am not.”

August is tough. It feels like it’s a month where everything changes, and sometimes, quite suddenly. Children who were home full time and gone to school for a good chunk of the day. The weather, which was so hot we swam in it most days, finds us shivering and looking for a warmer layer (which I know excites some of you. I cannot relate. I am already fearing winter). Today, I looked out my window at my backyard to see some of my dogwood’s leaves blushing red, a color I’m sure it was not wearing yesterday.

Change is exhausting. It requires an adaptation of our entire selves: physical, mental, emotional. The regularly scheduled programming of my life has suddenly been disrupted. And, as a result, I have not written. Not one single word. The novel I’ve been working on? It’s been stuck at 25,000 words for months. Occasionally, I reread it. Sometimes I add a sentence. Mostly, I stare.

And then the familiar feelings show up. The “I should be writing” guilt. The “why can’t I just get myself to do this?” spiral. Shame, that old familiar friend, creeps in and pulls up a chair.

How does a writer confess that she’s not writing?

Just like that, I guess. And once it’s out in the open, it’s easier to deal with. It’s accepted. It’s reality.

What I have been doing, though—is teaching.

And I forgot how much I love it. Sure, there’s grading and rosters and attendance and rubrics, but if I had my way, I’d just lock the door and learn for the sake of learning. We’d talk. We’d read. We’d write. There’d be snacks. It would be great.

Right now, we’re diving into rhetoric, which I was not taught in high school. Or college. It wasn’t until grad school, when a professor casually dropped the word in conversation, that I scribbled it down in my notebook like, what is that and why does everyone else seem to already know it?

In its simplest form, rhetoric is about persuasion. And sure, we all recognize it in political speeches or glossy magazine ads—but what about Instagram reels? YouTube shorts? That oddly compelling TikTok voiceover? Are we paying attention to the way persuasion shows up in the small stuff? The everyday?

The first major assignment my students had to complete was entitled “Rhetoric in Reality.” They had to find areas where they hadn’t necessarily been aware of rhetoric before. Some of their responses surprised even me. “Just Do It” came from prison inmate Gary Gilmore’s last words on death row (yes, I looked it up and you should too). KATSEYE is a group selling Gap denim (yup, go ahead and look them up too). Selena Gomez is selling Rare Beauty Cosmetics. People who have nothing to do with the products are pushing them at us consumers. It makes me wonder: have I purchased something just because I attach it to another person who recommended it to me? Did I ever research it myself?

It made me stop and ask: How many things have I purchased, followed, or believed in just because someone I liked told me to? How many things have I not questioned?

Because rhetoric is everywhere. Not just in marketing, but in our conversations. In how we introduce ourselves. In how we frame our stories. Everyone’s got an angle, whether they know it or not.

And here’s the part that gets tricky: once you start seeing it, you can’t unsee it. As I told a few of my students in their feedback, “Rhetoric is so tricky because once you begin to see it, it shows up everywhere. Even in your everyday conversations with friends. The goal is to recognize it, without letting it overwhelm you.”

So that’s where I am. Writing less, teaching more. Watching the world shift from summer into fall. Watching my students shift from passive consumers to critical thinkers. Remembering that even if I’m not writing chapters right now, I’m helping others write their way toward understanding—and that counts too.

We keep going. We change what we can, accept what we can’t. We teach, we learn, and we remind ourselves: rhetoric is everywhere. And maybe, if we pay attention, we can get just a little better at naming it.

So much curriculum writing this summer, right? Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave me much time for my actual fun, fiction writing. Fortunately, I am one of those strange people who loves writing curriculum. Good thing I’m in the education profession, right? After my first son was born, writing middle school language arts curriculum was my part-time, work-from-home job.

I had taken three full semesters off from the community college where I teach to deal with some health issues. (Public Service Announcement: Lyme disease is real and unpleasant. Always check for ticks after you spend time in a wooded area.) This upcoming semester I will be teaching EN101, online, as a seven-week course.

Teaching at a community college is equal parts difficult and rewarding. It’s rewarding to offer classes to the general community, those that aren’t necessarily college-bound, those that didn’t graduate with a high (or even decent) GPA.Those that can count the number of positive memories or academic success stories from high school on one hand. But that’s also the reason it can be difficult; often my students are juggling many other things outside my classroom. Jobs (some of them full-time). Families. Low income lives that have them in affordable housing many miles outside of town with cars that barely run and sometimes don’t start at all. In the seated classroom, regular attendance is difficult. Even with an online class, consistently meeting the demands of weekly deadlines can just be too much. It is typical in my EN101 classes to begin the semester with 25 students…and end up with 17 at the end of the semester.

Now I’ve been challenged to take my typical 15 week class and smush it down into a mere 7 weeks. And it’s not as easy as simply doubling up the workload. Writing is a process, takes time, has necessary steps. In my previous EN101 classes, the research essay took 4-5 weeks. And I needed every one of those steps, those individual deadlines to walk them through the process: choosing a topic, evaluating sources, creating a thesis, performing research, crafting a rough draft, working through revision, submitting a final draft. Currently I’m scratching my head at how that entire process can be condensed to 2-3 weeks.

In my 25 years of teaching, I have come to understand writing as a process so much more than simply a product. But grades and report cards and state standards and limited time force writing as a product to take precedence. I have fought it as much as I can in my own collegiate classroom, but in only seven weeks, I’m not sure how much space there is for any process at all. I fear my semester will be one of writing a draft, offering a quick revision and submitting a final draft.

That brings me back to the current moment: attempting to plan a 7-week EN101 course which is meaningful and engaging and doesn’t overwhelm my community college students to the point where most of them find they have no choice but to drop out.

Wish me luck.