Study Delight

"if this isn't nice, what is?"

This newsletter goes out today to all my subscribers for whom I am very grateful! Hi! I hope you’re doing well and enjoying the waning days of summer.

First, THANK YOU to all who took part in Saturday’s 3-in-90 workshop! It was a lively and fun session. I feel like there were a lot of breakthroughs as we re-imagined, re-voiced, and re-animated those lifeless drafts! This is what participant Raima Larter had to say:

“I took Kathy's workshop yesterday, and I have to tell you it was fantastic. I continued working on the piece I started yesterday and am so excited by how it's turning out! Looking forward to trying this method with other drafts. Kathy's classes are SO good.”

My next workshop will be Sat., Sept. 13th from 1:00 - 2:30 pm Eastern Time, entitled, “How Does it Feel? Writing Emotion from the Inside Out.” If interested, you can find more information and register by clicking the button below:

In other news, I was recently asked to provide a writing prompt for AWP’s magazine, the Writer’s Chronicle. Check it out here: "Prompted.” See also the terrific prompts from Melissa Frateriggo and Court Harler!

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Recommended Reading - Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights

Recently, I find myself rereading this tender, funny, inspiring collection. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It will, I promise, lighten your heart, and don’t we all need that right now? He says this in the preface:

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”

My charge to you today, my friends, is to study delight.

Give yourself 250 words or so to simply revel in whatever loveliness you can find today. And consider making this a part of your daily writing practice!

Kurt Vonnegut said, “My Uncle Alex, who is up in Heaven now, one of the things he found objectionable about human beings was that they so rarely noticed it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

So I hope that you will do the same for the rest of your lives. When things are going sweetly and peacefully, please pause a moment, and then say out loud, "If this isn't nice, what is?”

Okay friends, I’m off to beautiful Grand Lake, Colorado, for the annual “Flash Fiction Rendezvous in the Rocky Mountains” retreat I do with Nancy Stohlman. There are always so many delights to experience in this rustic setting. Without fail, every summer, a kind of magic happens for those of us gathered. It’s one of my favorite places on earth.

Yours in delight,

Kathy