by Clifford Mae Henderson | Mar 16, 2021 | Uncategorized
Maybe it’s my background in theater, but I love novels with lots of juicy dialogue. But what makes dialogue good? What makes it ring true? Here’s one thing: sometimes we don’t talk to each other, we talk at each other. An example from real life. But first, a little...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Feb 16, 2021 | Dear Reader, The writing life
The other night I was watching an episode of my new, favorite TV show, The Repair Shop. If you’ve never seen it, let me just say, it’s perfect Pandemic entertainment. It’s educational, predictable, and, as Dixie pointed out, full of nice people. It’s a place where...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Jan 19, 2021 | Dear Reader, Musings
The inauguration is today! Yipee! We’ve voted the maniac crook lying misogynist narcissist out of the White House. He wanted a military-style sendoff? Shoot him from a cannon, say I. To be completely transparent, at this moment, as I sit here at my desk writing, the...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Dec 15, 2020 | Musings
They say that to change someone’s belief about something, you need to change all the other beliefs holding it up, aka: the scaffolding of that belief. It started years ago with Dixie’s mom sending us a Greenberg smoked turkey every Thanksgiving. Once a small family...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Nov 17, 2020 | Dear Reader, Musings
My phone keeps pestering me to update to Apple Pay. I’m sure it would be convenient to just hold my phone over the grocery store contactless reader and have the cost of my marinated mozzarella, crackers, and bag of apples magically be deducted from my bank account....
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Oct 20, 2020 | Dear Reader, Musings
On Saturday, I evicted someone from their home. Or I think I did. It’s a little hard to tell when home is a blanket, a single shoe, a filthy t-shirt, five large Budweiser cans, a yellow disposable razor, two Kit Kat wrappers, and a used syringe. All of it under a...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Sep 16, 2020 | Dear Reader, The writing life
I’m not sure if I have nothing to say—or too much to say. Either way, I’m on an informal hiatus from writing. The words just kind of stopped. Maybe it was the shock of how quickly Covid changed my life: robbing me of theater, my job, my rituals. Or maybe it’s the...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Aug 18, 2020 | Musings, Uncategorized
I practiced civil inattention long before I knew what it was called. For instance: as a kid growing up in Philly, I took public transportation a lot and regularly pretended the person sitting next to me wasn’t picking their nose/crying/talking to themselves. For...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Jul 14, 2020 | Black Lives Matter
I am inspired to share this story after reading Renee Bess’s June 25th blog on Woman and Words. If you haven’t read it, please do. I am specifically inspired by her phrase: “Those of us who have grown up living in racially diverse communities, attended schools with...
by Clifford Mae Henderson | Jun 17, 2020 | Uncategorized
So I’m standing out at Lighthouse Field in Santa Cruz, California. I’m there with thousands of other protesters. I’ve come with a few friends, all younger than me by at least a decade, and they are at least a couple of decades older than most of the other protesters....
