Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I didn’t realize until I flipped over my planner page that Inauguration Day aligns with Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It may happen more often than I think, and I just haven’t noticed since we only have an inauguration every four years. Though looking it up, it has happened only twice before this: the second inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

So maybe not that often if it’s only the third time.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I read a fascinating piece on the power of retelling stories. Not your own story (though there is a different power in that), but taking Shakespeare or a Greek tragedy or a favourite fairy tale and giving it new life by playing with elements of the story.

The reason:

There’s comfort in returning to worlds we already know the rules of and characters we already love and understand … writers are drawn to retellings because they’re often the stories they grew up with, or have heard again and again. These stories might have taught us what stories were.

More than the story itself, it is the choosing of the story. Why are we drawn to certain situations? Certain characters? Certain settings? How does changing one element of the original story change your entire understanding?

What story would you love to see retold? I’m drawn to a bunch of Hans Christian Andersen stories, including “The Nightingale,” which sounds so much cooler when you call it Nattergalen.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Was it Erin McKeown’s newsletter about writing a will or planning an upcoming trip that triggered this thought, but do you schedule graveyard visits when you’re going somewhere new?

A long time ago, visiting graveyards and photographing graves was one of my top trip destinations. I remember getting to Oslo late in the day, setting down my things, and immediately setting out to find Ibsen’s grave in a nearby cemetery.

Josh was less enthralled with going to graveyards. He wasn’t against it, but he wasn’t taking three modes of transportation to get to a graveyard outside a city just because a favourite writer was buried there. I mean, it makes sense: you’re not seeing a place where they lived. You’re just seeing a stone with their name on it. So graveyards were dropped from the itinerary, and it went from being my number one scheduled activity to a only-if-it-happens-organically activity on trips.

Do other people visit graveyards when they travel?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Kathy left a recent comment about how “we do our situational best with the information/knowledge we have at the time.”

In writing her back, I started thinking about all of the things our parents allowed us to do that we would never permit now because we know more, such as sitting in the way back of the station wagon (no seat belt and waving to other drivers, distracting them), biking without a helmet, and motioning to truck drivers to pull their horns. Actually, it seems like a lot of the things we would never allow now have to do with distracting other drivers.

What are things you’d never do (or allow) now that were commonplace in childhood?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I didn’t expect that I would start sobbing as I read this story, and you need to read all the way to the end to get the full impact, but I’ll leave this here if you need a good, hopeful cry this morning (gift link).*

* I call it a good, hopeful cry because some cries just make you sad, and some cries make you feel hopeful that there are good stories in the world.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.