JOYLENE NOWELL BUTLER

Learning How to Be a Kind Person Takes a Whole Lifetime. This thought – “Learning how to be a kind person takes a whole lifetime” – popped into my head, although I don’t know what triggered the thought. Yet the more I pondered it, the more I wanted to write about it. My first reflection was that my parents taught …

Recently an interviewer asked me how I thought the pandemic had changed me. I don’t remember how I answered, although afterwards I thought about this question both as applying to individuals and to writers. As individuals we probably have many different answers, perhaps ranging from becoming more aware of our actions (wearing masks) to what we can do by ourselves …

As writers we know that sometimes things in our writing can interrupt the “fictive dream” as John Gardner discusses in his classic book THE ART OF FICTION. For example, this can be an unfamiliar word rather than a familiar one, the deciphering of which pulls readers’ concentration from the story. For me, the most upsetting instances of interrupting the “fictive …

Some of you may know of my free nonfiction Holocaust theater project THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE to combat anti-Semitism and hate. The project has been developed to educate teens about the past (the Holocaust) and to encourage these teens to speak up for what is right today. Thus I was very excited when I came across an article on …