Barbara Abercrombie's Blog

Dear Readers, I started WritingTime on Typepad eight years ago with the help and insistence of my daughter Brooke who said if I was a writer I had to have a blog. My early readers were coerced students, about 18...

The UCLA Extension Writers Studio started last Thursday and ended last night (it goes from 10:00 to 6:00 every day.) It's intense and exciting to teach and such great people show up to take the workshops. I taught a workshop...

My annual Lake Arrowhead Writers Retreat is a private weekend workshop and retreat for all writers - those with work in progress as well as those looking for a nurturing environment in which to jumpstart their writing. It's held at...

I'm reading Ann Patchett's collection of essays This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, and I'm going slowly because I don't want it to end. I'm also discussing it in my UCLA Writer's Studio workshop next week so I'm...

We're home after a quick wonderful visit to Purdue University in Indiana, where the weather was freezing (and I mean freezing) but the reception couldn't have been warmer. R. gave a talk at the celebration for Dr. Arvind Raman becoming...

On MLK Day there's this skinny kid with his drums in the parking lot next to our house, facing the ocean and the about-to-set sun, drummng his heart out. It's wonderful - loud and full of life and making a...

I'm celebrating! I just finished the essay I was grumbling and fretting and trying to keep calm about a few posts ago. (It'll be in an anthology about faith edited by Victoria Zackheim and published next year by Simon and...

Happy New Year, dear readers. If you're a subscriber and received dozens of of posts you'd already read, please accept my apologies. We were transferring the posts to my website, www.BarbaraAbercrombie.com and they flew out like birds, landing everywhere. 2014!...

Happy New Year, dear readers. If you're a subscriber and received dozens of of posts you'd already read, please accept my apologies. We were transferring the posts to my website, www.BarbaraAbercrombie.com and they flew out like birds, landing everywhere. 2014!...

You know those Christmas card pictures with three generations of family all dressed in coordinated clothes and standing in some beautiful spot looking relaxed? This is not one of them. This is my family (one grandson and a boyfriend missing)...