I remember well those years when I wondered whether anyone would ever publish my work. I was forty-one when my first book came out, a mere whippersnapper compared to Delana Jensen Close of Dublin, Ohio, who, at the age of 95 celebrates the launch of her debut novel, The Rock House. It would be easy…

I’d like to continue the conversation I started last week concerning how to end a piece of writing with resonance. Here are some further thoughts from a post I ran in 2014 as well as some examples from both fiction and nonfiction. Emily Dickinson said this in an 1870 remark to Thomas Wentworth Higginson:  “If…

Duke Ellington recorded his jazz standard, “It Don’t Mean a Thing” (lyrics by Irving Mills), in 1932. The opening of the song questions the value of music that doesn’t possess a certain measure of resonance: What good is melody? What good is music? If it ain’t possessing something sweet The lyrics go on to speculate…

Cathy and I just got back from West Palm Beach, Florida, where we went to see the traveling Downton Abbey exhibition, and also to just get away to somewhere warm. Besides the exhibition, we had no other plans. We ended up doing a lot of people watching, and we spent a day poolside. Most of…

I have to apologize for my absence from this blog the past two weeks. Two weeks ago, Cathy and I were in New Orleans celebrating the wedding of our friends, Kristen and George, and then last Sunday an unexpected hospital stay prevented me from posting. So, a chosen vacation and then one chosen for me.…

We’re off to a start of a new semester here at Ohio State University, and I’m teaching an advanced undergraduate creative nonfiction workshop. I came up with a writing activity for our first meeting–with a nod toward Dinty Moore whose own activity inspired this one–and I want to pass it along to you. The activity…

I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Early in the book, when Smarsh is tracing the courtship and eventual marriage of her grandparents in rural Kansas, I hit a passage that I just have to read to my wife. “She’s talking about our…

Here we are on the cusp of a new year, a time for resolutions and new beginnings. If you’re a writer, it’s time to set your sights on the projects ahead of you. With that in mind, I offer up these ten starters for anyone who likes to tell stories, whether you call yourself a…

This is my Christmas Eve blog post, and I want to use it to thank all of you who bless me—friends, family members, students, and those who read what I write, particularly those regular readers of this blog. To be honest, it sometimes gets tough to come up with new posts, but I keep trying…

For the better part of my youth, my father, and then later I, would go into the woods on our eighty-acre farm in southeastern Illinois and cut a cedar which would serve as our Christmas tree. Needless to say, it was always a tree whose branches had grown according to nature’s will, which is to…