I’ve just come home from the Antioch Writers’ Workshop Fall Retreat, where today I listened to writers talk about how important it is for them to find the time to do what makes them happy—moving words about on the page. I’ve been among folks who enjoyed the gift of time this weekend. They made significant…

We’re one week away from the official publication date for my new craft book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, so I thought I’d post the acknowledgment page from the book along with a selection from “The Writing Life” section that pays tribute to my mother and to all she unknowingly…

We’re two weeks away from the official publication date for my craft book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, something I never could have seen coming when I started this blog way back when. Before this blog, I’d never done much writing about writing. Instead, I’d done a good bit of…

Last week, Cathy and I went to our local humane society and adopted a cat, an eight month-old orange tabby we named Stella. As we understand it, female orange tabby cats are rare, so Stella is special indeed for all sorts of reasons. Our poems, stories, essays, novels, memoirs are all special as well, marked…

When I was a boy on our farm in southeastern Illinois, my parents had a telephone that was on a party line, which meant that if a small boy chose, as this one did, to pick up the phone from time to time, he might be able to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. My grandmother…

Autumn Semester classes get underway this week at Ohio State University, and as they do, I’ll enter my thirty-sixth year of teaching. I know I’ve written about this before, but two stories bear repeating. My mother taught elementary school for thirty-eight years. She found plenty to keep her busy in her retirement. She helped my…

I’ve just returned from a week at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, where I taught a workshop focusing on the novel. Six novelists sat in a room with me for two hours and fifteen minutes each day, and together we workshopped excerpts from their novels in progress. We also used The…

I’m off to teach at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Workshop. If you’re ever in the market for a summer writers’ conference, I highly recommend this one. It’s all about the craft! No agents, no editors, and none of that toxic atmosphere of “who’s made it, and what do I have to…