How alive do you want to be?

  “Searching for an objectively ‘better’ home is a poor reason to live abroad.” Ta-Nehisi Coates on Twitter   They say that when you live abroad that it goes in cycles: the first year is the honeymoon year. You swoon at the language, the accent, the magic of it all. It’s like Liz Gilbert in […]

Writing for Ducks

Today, we watched Frozen twice. Once because they were tired and once because I was tired. Usually we do puzzles and read and bake and play in the little pink kitchen that’s always askew in the corner. But today we snuggled, we danced, we sang. We also ate Kit-Kats and had chocolate smeared on our […]

Becoming Who I Am

“Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess.” ~Parker Palmer I was three months into my new stay-at-home-mom life. I had spent years holding onto a lawyer job that didn’t fit. I held onto it much longer than I probably […]

Writing for Rescue

It’s interesting to me that The Mudroom’s first anniversary would fall on a month where the theme is Vocation, Career, Mission. When I was younger I adored Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and the legendary Harriet the Spy. I took out books from the library on the history of the FBI. I pretended I was […]

And Yet.

  I’m not good at waiting. I never have been. Sadly, I can take after Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “Daddy, I want a golden goose, and I want it NOW!” Because the waiting is right where hope can feel a bit foolish. I sat in the bathtub one morning as child […]

When Your Birth is the Slow Kind

I have a book that I’ve been writing for a thousand years. (Are you really a thousand years old, you ask? Is that unnecessary hyperbole?) Oh, hush. I am. I must be, because I am quite sure that this book has taken me that long.  A thousand years, yesterday. That makes me a thousand and a day, today. […]

I Know Why They Chose to Sink

I came across a journal the other day with one of the only poems I’ve written in more than a decade. My college years were spent between literary criticism, philosophy papers, and procrastinating by writing poetry. But after life got increasingly full and more complicated, I let verse fall to the wayside. That fullness quite […]

The Fear Underneath It All

 To listen to the spoken-word version of this post by Ashley, click below.   “But the tigers come at night. With their voices soft as thunder. As they tear your world apart. As they turn your dreams to shame . . .”  ~”I Dreamed a Dream,” Les Miserables   “You’ll never do it again. Your words are […]

Meet the Princess of the Press: Ida B. Wells

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees Before Billie Holiday sang the lyrics above at Cafe Society, the first integrated nightclub in New York, another icon of history, sat nightly, frantically documenting every lynching […]

The Famous Woman You’ve Never Heard Of

“A great deal of living must go to a very little writing.” – Frances Ridley Havergal You probably don’t recognise her name. But if she had been born today, you would.  She was the equivalent of a famous Christian singer-songwriter. You would have gone to one of her gigs, sung her songs, heard her testimony. […]