Month: March 2022

“When his wife had been alive, he had hardly noticed Jessie Morrow; indeed, if possible, he had noticed her even less than he had noticed his wife.”

In a 1978 BBC radio program, Barbara Pym said, “Perhaps I’ve been influenced by something I was once told about Proust – that he was said to go over all his characters and make them worse.” I laughed when I heard this because Pym does have a way of … Read More

“What would happen if one conceptualized a social system as a system of energy?”

Here’s a radical idea: The primary responsibility of teachers and leaders is not to issue orders; it’s to release the energy of the people and manage the processes for using that energy to achieve goals. This idea was ahead of its time when Malcolm Knowles published it in 1983. It … Read More

“Turn procrastination into rehearsal.”

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, describes writers like me when he says that when we’re not writing, we are often doubting ourselves. We feel bad.  Instead, we could think of this period of delay as something constructive. We could reframe it as rehearsal. Just … Read More