Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

A writer takes a minute for a closer look

recent posts

Category: Random

Me talkin to myself

  • Ups, downs, etc.

    I stumbled on a couple of concepts that deserve mulling: performance goals vs. learning goals, described by Stanford University researcher Carol Dweck, and willpower as emotion, described by Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Dweck’s work notes that learning goals help us work beyond mistakes and failure while performance goals…

  • Horse latitudes of writing

    I am becalmed. I know this spot from previous long writing projects. Nothing like the exciting beginning when the ideas cascade and occupy most of the mental bandwidth. Nothing like the surprise at the end when you type a sentence and as you look at it, it dawns on you that you have arrived at…

  • Off my usual route

    If you visit the Wikipedia page describing the Palouse, you get a much better picture of this voluptuous landscape than my little image, snapped from behind a windshield at 60 mph. It’s an experience to visit this area of western Idaho/eastern Washington in spring and I don’t think pictures can do it justice. To see…