Lisa Yoder

Category: Life as Art

  • Good for What Ails You: Recipe for a Relaxing Night

    I hope your holidays were/are delightful! I spent mine laying around my parents’ farmhouse, ‘grammin’ photos of a mild rural Central PA winter, working, and eating an obscene amount of cheese. After a seriously pleasant few days back on the farm, we rolled into Philly late Saturday afternoon. Upon opening the car door to unload…

  • Reality Christmas

    When the house is a mess. When you’ve lost a loved one. When you’re acknowledging the anniversary of losing someone. When you and your partner are not feeling (or acting) peaceful towards one another. When work is annoying, or you have to work more than you’d like during the holidays. When there’s not enough work…

  • An Invitation Is Not an Imposition

    The other night I was chatting with friends over soft pretzels and beer at Frankford Hall about some of my anxieties around socializing. “I have this weird thing,” I told them, “where I won’t invite people to do things or initiate making plans because I feel like I’m imposing. It’s so weird. I don’t know…

  • Yes to One Thing, No to Ten

    In April, when I spoke at the Women in Tech Summit, the panel moderator asked us all what we’d do if we weren’t afraid. The first thing that came to my mind was that I’d say no more. At the time, it seemed like such a novel and revolutionary and original idea. I said something…

  • Barcelona: Past & Present Dispatches

    In 2007, I spent six months in Spain, and only 36 hours of that in Barcelona. Those 36 hours turned out to be incredibly eventful — long enough to stand outside the Sagrada Familia and wish we could afford the small entrance fee, long enough to get tricked into eating 15 euro frozen-dinner tourist paella,…

  • Travel, Making Art, & Permission

    Do you remember the Amtrak Writers’ Residency craze that was happening several months ago? It felt like everyone I knew was talking about it some capacity, most of them longingly. What could be done with weeks on a train to write one’s heart out? Artists wanted in on it too, calling for an artists’ residency.…