Author: Callie J. Smith
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Living in Color: Working with the Difficult Parts of Our Lives
In “Quietness” the Sufi mystic poet Rumi speaks of taking an axe to one’s prison wall and walking out “like someone suddenly born into color” (trans. by Coleman Barks). It’s left me thinking of how many prisons humans build – both literal and metaphorical – and how often they do not serve the purposes of…
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On Mental Illness, Silence, and Suddenly Color
There are many reasons we have difficulty talking about mental illness. Those silences have shaped my new novel, Suddenly Color: A Sacred Grounds Novel Book 2.
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Pausing with Whatever: Practices of a Monk in the World
The titles on my bookshelves don’t fully reveal what those shelves or their books actually hold. Because I have the habit of tucking notes into my books for safekeeping, I never quite know what will fall out when I open a book. Not a great organizational method for my correspondence, this tucking away of notes…
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Miracle of the Fish
If you were to imagine God as a character in a story, what would God be like? Like a human? More like some other kind of creature? What kind of personality would this character have? (Don’t go with your first thought. Keep brainstorming and try an idea that’s four or five ideas down the list.)…
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Vomit Drafts: On the Value of Low-Quality Work
Do you resist doing things badly? I do. I strongly dislike the idea of producing low-quality work. (Can you tell I’m a recovering perfectionist?) I take all sorts of steps to avoid creating anything I might consider even remotely inaccurate, unaesthetic, tedious, or of an otherwise unhelpful quality. This approach, of course, can introduce its…
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On Joy and Summer Trees
Are there memories whose goodness has surprised you? Though not a poet, I took a workshop earlier this year which involved writing a poem that explored the divine through joy. Inspired by the vividness of Li-Young Lee’s sense-awakening poem “From Blossoms”, I tried writing about a kind of remembering moment that has taken me by surprise,…
About the author
Callie J. Smith writes about women who, like her, are finding themselves. Her essays and cozy fiction (contemporary and fantasy) explore everyday things like hope, creativity, and grief.
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