Month: June 2019

I love music: cheesy 1980s anthems, chamber, jazz, classic rock and roll, baroque, bachata, cabaret, chansons, big band, electro swing, disco, broadway, pop, American songbook, country, and styles I have yet to discover (including noir rock … thanks Cate!). To riff off the famous quote by Lily Bollinger, “I listen to music when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I listen to it when I’m alone. When I have company I consider it obligatory.” Music can transform our moods, lift our spirits, and soothe our souls.

It’s hard to pick up a newspaper these days without reading something that makes your heart ache. It doesn’t matter where you live or how you vote, all of us are aware that there’s a lot of suffering in this world. We have different levels of tolerance, but most of us have a limit to how much disheartening information we can take in without feeling overwhelmed. It’s very tempting to completely disengage.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? Me! That’s who. Now I consider her one of my writing heroes. But why was I afraid of her? I’ve been exploring all sorts of fears and how they affect writers this week in the blog so I’ll tell you why Woolf used to scare me.

I can hear you chortling out there. Fear of knitting. But consider that within 0.45 seconds of Googling “fear of knitting,” I had more than 24 million hits. That’s a lot of fear of knitting, folks. Good to know I’m not alone.
            Because fear is often not rational, its target can be something seemingly silly, like knitting. In my case, I’ve watched and admired knitters for decades, wondering how do they do that magical stuff with their fingers and yarn. So perfect.