Blog

A Memorable Teaching Experience

     As this new year begins, I’m reminded of a brief, unique teaching experience that began some 42 years ago this month. Though temporary and lasting only five months, the course I created and taught that semester at a community college has made an indelible mark in my memory for reasons that will be described here.…

Author of the Month

Thursday, December 8, I’ll be reading at the Northampton Senior Center at 1pm. 

A Writers Night with Stephanie Shafran

Writers Read

I LOVE HULL

My “Little Bit of Paradise”          In the 1920s, my grandparents and their three children lived in Dorchester, Massachusetts. As the owner of Yellin Dry Goods store in downtown Boston, my grandfather dreaded his daily commute by automobile to and from work. When he learned that a place called Hull, a lovely seaside town on Boston’s…

The Poetry Ritual

Tzebrokhnkayt

Tzebrokhnkayt: the quality of broken heartedness that gives strength in healing When twenty first-grade students and six adult staff members were murdered by a young adult assassin at Sandy Hook ten years ago, I reeled with feelings of rage, sadness, and horror. Yet almost immediately, as an elementary school counselor, I had to put personal…

Have You Ever Won Anything?

         It was 1995. Home with three young daughters, I joined a weekly women’s writing group led by Amherst Writers & Artists founder Pat Schneider. A fledgling poet,  I read my poems aloud for the first time. Yet to be discovered was the arduous journey from silence to freedom that this process of writing and…