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No two ways about it: without this challenge, I wouldn’t have written today.
I got to bed at 4:00 a.m. and rose six hours later. As is my (bad) habit, I reached immediately for my phone to check email and ensure there were no crises.
Except there was.
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1,002 words today. So far, so good.
And considering how the past 36 hours have gone, that’s saying something.
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Nothing is convenient.
The sooner we learn this fact, the better. (By “we,” I mean me.)
Case in point: my workload was slow for the first half of May. Scary-slow. The kind of slow that makes you think, “Well, this is it. I had a good run, but it’s over.” Like Blockbuster, or the people who made 8-track tapes.
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When I was in high school, I wrote constantly. Stories spilled out of my brain, and my pencil was barely swift enough to catch them all. Sprawled on my bed, upright at my desk, out on the swing (where the stories raced around my mind, here and gone in nearly the same instant). Summer nights while the rest of the family slumbered, the hours ticking away as I reveled in my made-up world.
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True confession: I am not a technowhiz.
Which is why, when people talk about dictating their writing, I have visions of the device I used in the mid-1980s to transcribe tapes dictated by bosses who were far too busy to write words on a page. Notably, those guys (back then, men dictated and women transcribed) were considered cutting-edge (a term not yet invented) because they used a machine for dictating instead of having a secretary sitting in front of them with a steno pad.
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It’s official: I am now an exvangelical.
To be clear: I haven’t walked away from Jesus. But I have walked away from the particular church I once thought was teaching His word and His love.
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Delighted to announce that my short story, “The Women in the Club,” placed as a finalist in the 2020 Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Competition!
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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3d ed. 1992) defines “distract” thusly:
1. To cause to turn away from the original focus of attention or interest; divert.
2. To pull in conflicting emotional distractions; unsettle.
By these definitions, I have definitely been distracted lately.
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How many of the following have you heard, read, or said in the past year?
“We couldn’t go to Florida this year because covid.”
“I have a Zoom meeting at 3.”
“My kids are doing remote today.”
“Senior shopping hours start at 6 a.m.”
“My church has in-person worship, but you have to register.”
“I got my vaccine appointment!”
“Can’t believe the hospitals are low on PPE again.”
“Our state’s positivity rate is down to 2.5%.”
“We do curbside pickup!”
“I’d love to go to the U.K., but they’re in lockdown.”
“I missed Thanksgiving because I had to quarantine.”
“Did you get Pfizer, Moderna, or J&J?”
“Mask up.”
Two years ago, none of these lines would have made sense. Now, we’re fluent in the language of the pandemic. Statements like these brand us as the people who have spent the past year battling the deadliest virus any of us could ever have imagined.
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P. Jo Anne Burgh 