Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts.It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

Jim Grimsley's unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.

I love the good old book with glue and binding, I really do, but that is just one way of experiencing text, and suddenly we have so many new ways, including our laptops, our phones, our watches. People in my generation agonize over this. People much younger than me don't agonize at all. They just go ahead and find ways to transform publishing.

Words will never fully capture what is alive in our hearts.It would be a shame, though, if we denied our bears their dancing.

Floyd Skloot’s Revertigo is a beautifully-written, moving account of one man’s off kilter life. Who would have imaged a memoir exploring months of extreme vertigo and decades of neurological turbulence would be filled with so much joy and optimism? This gentle, wise, and perceptive memoir never fails to surprise.

Perhaps we can never understand our own children, because there is too much of ourselves inside there, or perhaps we are just blinded by the illusion that there is so much of ourselves inside of them.

Exercise the muscles that compassionately open the heart.In your writing and your life.