Nora Holzinger

  This month, I stopped taking birth control. Not get pregnant but to feel alive again.  As a troubled teen, my mother put me on the pill to ensure there were no “accidents” that would get between me and a college education. I would stay on the pill for ten continuous years and with a brief three-year stint off of it.  In my most recent experience getting back on birth control, I went through four or five different prescriptions since each one left me more and more irritable than the last. My sex drive fell off a cliff and my experience of the world somehow felt….darker than it did during those three brief years without hormonal contraceptives. I feel less joy, less sadness, less awe. I feel like an automaton going through the motions of the day.  And that’s why I decided to get off the pill.  I want to feel the full spectrum of human experience again. I have one human life and one human body  to inhabit for a while and I want to experience it all - the pai...

By now, thousands of people have seen my article, The Artist’s Way is Elitist Trash . In it I critique the classic book by creativity guru Julia Cameron. The article got a lot more attention (and hate comments) than I anticipated, but I stand by everything I wrote. Well just a few months ago, at a charity book store in Silver City, New Mexico, I happened upon a copy of Writing Down the Bones (1986) by Natalie Goldberg, for a sensible $2. I had never heard of this book before, but for $2 I was willing to risk it.  I took the book back to the strawbale cabin I was renting at the edge of the Gila Wilderness and sat in the warmth of the late-winter sun and read. I read and read and finished the book, and then I turned back to page one and read it a second time. At this point, I think I’ve read this book four or five times. Part writing/creativity book and part Zen meditation guide, this slim volume teaches writing as a kind of meditative practice, a practice that can produce quality,...