Anna Gates Ha

In the early morning, the summer air is magnanimously cool. I rise before anyone else is awake. I sit on my little cushion, close my eyes, try to fold myself...

When I first picked up Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, I was in a pretty bad place. I’d been a mom for about three years, and I was still struggl...

As I’ve been working on my novel (which, by the way, has morphed into a multi-voice, more-like-linked-short-stories-than-a-novel novel) and editing some love...

For a very long time, when someone asked me what my novel was about, I became really anxious. It didn’t matter if I had two-hundred or twenty-thousand words w...

Like so many other writers, I fell in love with reading at a young age. There were many things that drew me to words, including my love for fantasy and for s...

Oh, mama. Things haven’t gone as you’ve planned, have they? It’s eleven o’clock at night, and your baby has been screaming for the last three hours. You’ve g...

I am, unequivocally, a sentence girl. I love the craft, the swing, of words that builds to create narration. Most of my experience with grammar—as a student,...

From an evolutionary standpoint, fear is very useful. It was fear—increased heart rate, tense muscles—that allowed our ancestors to recognize and react to th...

About a year ago, standing near the cold cut display, I met a woman who said she’d been to infinity and knew the meaning of life. She’d sucked me into the co...