Nerissa's T-Blog

If you neglect to recharge a battery, it dies. And if you run full speed ahead without stopping for water, you lose momentum to finish the race.––Oprah Winfrey Dearest Writers, Though I won’t be offering summer classes, you can come for one day (or more) during either of my retreats and thus keep your hand in your art, craft, process and community. July 8-10 is a short weekend retreat (Friday…

Greetings, writers!I've spent the last two years immersed in the written word. During my MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts I read over a hundred books, wrote two and a half novels, a sixty-page critical thesis on how authors have rendered bipolar and other mental illness from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries and created a forty-five minute video lecture on the…

This Week’s Prompt and Finds: Hi Writers, Happy World Poetry Day! Like a lot of you, I keep thinking about the WH Auden poem “Musée Des Beaux Arts.” Auden wrote this poem in 1938, when Europe was approaching the Second World War of the century. Though he never mentions the growing Nazi threat, it’s implicit in the words. The New York Times recently did a beautiful job showing the work of this…

Hi Writers, It’s a gorgeous 53° in Western MA, and the town just lifted its mask mandate. Lila and I are going to celebrate by taking Hudson for a walk, and then we’re going to join Tom and Johnny for Friday take-out and movie night. Any recommendations for movies/Netflix/must-see TV welcome! Below are this week’s prompts and wonderful things I came across recently. Enjoy! Revision Retreat In…

Hello writers, In a week full of devastating news, a post by Ilya Kaminsky has been getting me through: “Me, writing to an older friend in Odessa: how can I help, please let me know I really want to help. He writes back: Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are putting together a literary magazine. And that is in the middle of war. Imagine.”-Ilya…

Dear Writers, Like the groundhog, I’ve been peeking my head out of the ground to consider whether or not the thaw I feel is to be trusted. I’m thinking it is. This long winter of COVID may not be over, but like many of you, I’m ready to open up again. I’m also about to graduate from my two-year MFA program (Vermont College of Fine Arts, in Fiction), and this June, I’ll be presenting a graduating…

This is a sermon I delivered at the West Cummington Church on Lay Sunday Feb 16, 2025 Right before the election of 2016, my parents sold their lovely Virginia property, our home since the early 80s. It was down a dirt road with a couple of old barns and

This is a sermon I delivered at the West Cummington Church on Lay Sunday Feb 16, 2025 Right before the election of 2016, my parents sold their lovely Virginia property, our home since the early 80s. It was down a dirt road with a couple of old barns and a magnificent fifty-foot magnolia tree. It also had a swimming pool—more like a pond surrounded by trees. We girls were supposed to take turns…

I met Ellen Meeropol through the Rosenberg Fund for Children, for whom Katryna and I have done many benefits. But I subsequently discovered her an acclaimed novelist and amazing literary citizen, co-founder of Straw Dog Writers Guild, and general all-around awesome person. I recently had the honor of doing a reading with her and Essie Chambers at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, MA. After hearing…

And of course I know that God does not Keep a tally of the prayer-votesLike an old man scratching lines on the edge of a deskWith a pen knife Well, if only Susan had remembered to say her prayersKamala would have won Wisconsin.But the bros in Pennsylvania just had more scratch marks, so Please. My god is bigger than that, And so is theirs. And of course I tried to visualize victoryLike a good…

On Tuesday evenings, from 6-7:30pm Little Blue Studio as well as the Writing It Up in the Garden  Zoom room will be open for all members of Nerissa’s writing groups and Substack subscribers. Format: 6pm prompt, followed by silent writing.  At 7pm, a short reading by members of Morning Seeding & Tending.  

This essay first appeared in my newsletter, so if you read it there, don’t bother to read this again! Also, thank you all so much for your kind words and prayers for my upcoming surgery. I feel very reassured after several of you related your professional or anecdotal experience. I am SURE I am going to be fine! Since I wrote this, we took my eldest to college for the first time, and having…

Prepare to Publish is a generative writing group with a little more focused critique than other Writing It Up in the Garden workshops. This group grew out of Nerissa’s Weeding & Pruning manuscript group and is for experienced writers only. To apply, please send a published piece, and/or a writing sample and a letter of introduction to [email protected]. Unlock your publishing potential in our…

I’m with my husband, daughter and son—my family—for a ten-day trip to England and Wales. As I write these words, I feel a lump in my throat. Lila is 18, and in late August, she’s off to college. Johnny, almost 16, also has his own busy happy life. It’s very likely that the four of us will never again travel as a contained unit. Tom and I seem to have done what we were supposed to do in that…

Music has a power that I don't understand. I feel it sometimes when I experience the loyalty of our own following. But it took Karl's death for me to remember its sway on me. Lately, I've avoided listening to music. Why? Music makes me feel. I can't have

When I learned of the death of Karl Wallinger, best known as the auteur behind the band World Party, I felt as though a part of me, too, had died. And a part of me was born again. My first husband David introduced me to “Ship of Fools” while we were dating. We saw World Party on Saturday Night Live in 1990. I was taken with Wallinger’s look––a cross between John Lennon and Bob Dylan––and also…

Warning! This essay contains some (minor) spoilers for the novel Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (We’re still in the first half of the book). In her second novel Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie achieves an ideal to which I aspire: a smart, literary, highly readable love story full of cultural references, history, and vivid, textured characters––just the kind of…

Prompts are a helpful way to begin, to challenge that blank page. Some writers already show up to my workshops/groups/retreats with an idea in their head, or even an entire manuscript. Others like to be startled into creativity. I use several kinds of prompts. Most often, I use an entire poem. I see poems as secular prayer, a way of borrowing a bit of genius when I myself feel depleted. Reading…

I have reached a critical point in the list of orderly steps in the long march to publication which I have been given by others and have dutifully written down. They are/were as follows: 1.     Write the shitty first draft2.     Read it and make less shitty3.     Send it to Kind & Wise Mentory Editor Who Has Read James Joyce4.     Laugh and cry as you read her Kind & Wise suggestions; take 99%…