The first time I applied for admission to an MFA program, I didn’t get in, so I applied to the same program the next year and was accepted. I’m stubborn that way. It takes a whole lot of stubborn to be a writer. I’m thinking about all the folks who are right now applying for…

When I was a boy, it was my family’s New Year’s Eve tradition to gather for an oyster soup supper, followed by a rousing round of Rook, a trick-taking card game, that pitted one set of partners against another. We played a lot of Rook in those days. My father and my uncles were competitive,…

Nearly each year at Christmas, my father and I went out into our woods and cut a cedar tree. I only remember us having a store-bought pine tree a handful of times. So the cedar tree was sort of a Christmas tree, but not really—not a red pine, or a white pine, or a scotch…

This Christmas season has me thinking about privilege—those who have it, and those who don’t; those who are in the mainstream, and those who aren’t. I grew up in a small rural area of southeastern Illinois, an area where most people were working class. I remember a few folks who appeared to be on another…

Last week, my advanced undergraduate creative nonfiction workshop read Patrick Madden’s “Writing the Brief Contrary Essay” from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Madden talks about what he calls “essayistic subversion,” by which he means the essays that, to quote Phillip Lopate, “go against the grain of popular opinion.” Think, for example,…

We enter the Christmas season at the same time that I and my students are entering revision season. My students are preparing significant revisions of essays they’ve written this semester, while I’ve just finished going through my editor’s notes for my new novel, Late One Night, that’s coming out in May. Who knows what will…

It starts with the documentary about the Roosevelts that Ken Burns did for PBS—this overwhelming nostalgia that comes over me. I streamed the program on Netflix last week, and once it hit 1910, the year of my mother’s birth, I began to use the timeline to mark the progression of my parents’ lives. The Great…

I just got back from Louisville, KY, where I was part of a reading on Friday evening, and where I taught a class on constructing narratives at the Writer’s Block Festival on Saturday. The reading was held at the Bard’s Town, a restaurant and pub, and, yes, you guessed it, a Shakespearean theme. What writer…

When I was a small boy on our farm, I often felt lonely. I was an only child who had to get comfortable with being alone. Now I see what a blessing it was, a blessing of silence and solitude. I liked to read, and I liked to watch television, and I liked to play…

In my post last week, I suggested that, when we write about ourselves at an earlier age, we’re wise to do so from a position in the here-and-now that allows us to look at those idiots we surely were with humor while at the same time respecting that idiocy. A few people objected to the…