Rev Dr Sparky on Real/igion

Tag: Writing

  • It’s All Side Hustles Now

    Photo by Lost Co on Unsplash How I finally learned what I am If you live long enough, and change jobs and careers enough, and rewrite your resume often enough, it can get harder and harder to write that tricky “Profile” section with any kind of clarity or grace. Eventually, you have to re-write it for every…

  • Waiting Around with John Milton

    Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash Could be paradise up ahead Sometimes, if you’re feeling uncertain and sort of irrelevant, an old, dead, white-guy poem is just the thing you need to read. I mean that in the nicest way, too. I do love a great variety of humanity, but I am essentially an archaic, white, middlebrow…

  • I’m Nobody! Who are you?

    sparkPhoto by JR Korpa on Unsplash Are you — Nobody — too? My dear colleagues, fellow writers and readers and spiritual seekers and satirists, the Rev Dr Sparky is having an identity crisis. When a reader recently asked me straight up who I was, it took me aback, though not unpleasantly. I deflected his inquiry with the first lines of…

  • Why You Should Try the Worst Writing Job Ever

    Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash The hidden market in compliance prose Here’s some irony: I spent six years writing the driest, most dispassionate prose imaginable, and it helped my creative writing more than any of the artistic work I’ve ever done. Moreover, it paid the bills, left me plenty of time to do my own…

  • Desperation Journals for Writers

    Photo by Jordan Madrid on Unsplash When you’ve just got to try something different Today I have an embarrassing confession to make to all you dedicated writers, journalers, and diarists out there. During all the years that I have been scribbling away in Moleskines and crappy spirals, I have been writing down the wrong things. I…

  • Write, Pray, Love

    With apologies to John Keats (and Elizabeth Gilbert) It appears that writers cannot help thinking about writing. I suppose it’s analogous to sculptors thinking about carving marble, or musicians thinking about making melodies. But with writers, it’s amusing because we are thinking about words with, of course, words. It reminds me of television commercials advertising…

  • Words and Time and Souls

    Future conditional. Words are a miracle that we too often take for granted. We toss them around like Nerf balls, forgetting how essential they are for connecting us with the reality of people and things. And language — the way we weave those words together — reflects how we move through time. Language itself is a miracle, permeating our…