I am elated to welcome Jesse Stanchak, creator of Micro Flash Fiction (@MicroFlashFic) and author of “The Tyranny of Sand and Other Tiny Stories: The Best of @MicroFlashFic” as a guest blogger. Jesse’s microfiction stories, which he has been publishing three times a day for four years on Twitter, often reverberate in my head long […]
“You should get married”: This policy makes no sense
My friend, Yolanda Gordon, gave a TEDx talk (“The Poverty Pandemic”) in Rock Hill, S.C., on Nov. 13. Yolanda described her personal experiences as a single mother of three children, two on the autism spectrum, juggling as many jobs as possible with medical appointments, school meetings and all of the duties any mother faces. “I […]
Don’t let your mind wander!
WANDER: If you’re letting your phone give you directions on the back roads of middle Georgia, that’s fine (usually). However, if the voice says, “get left to prepare for a turn,” make sure there’s actually a second southbound lane when you decide to “get left.” Otherwise, you’ll end up where I was today: driving on […]
Why are there kids in the Darien Gap? And other SmartBrief stories
The upside of having a job where the main goal is to distill complex stories into two-sentence summaries is that my teams and I have to find the priority concepts in each one and be as clear as possible when we present them. The downside is that the two-sentence limit makes us cast off details […]
WORTHY: 31 days of 5-minute free writes
I have an email that I need to write for work today that I’ve been dragging my feet on. At the beginning, I just didn’t have time because it was a busy week. Now it’s Sunday and that email is the only “big” thing left on my to-do list. I worked in a quasi-governmental organization […]
TRUST: 31 days of 5-minute free writes
Today, I was driving home from my niece’s soccer game. I was driving west, and the sun was shining directly into my eyes. I’ve driven the rural, curvy road I was on many times (it’s the route from our hometown to Valdosta, Ga., where my daughter has lived since 2014). Today, I had hit just […]