I just got back from teaching a workshop in the novel at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference in Montpelier. I had six first-time novelists in the workshop, and I’d seen about twenty-five pages of each manuscript before we all arrived in Montpelier. Some people had complete drafts of their novels, and…

In all honesty, I had no idea what I would write about today. Then I went out to mow the yard, and I noticed a Tonka Truck dump truck in the yard across the street, and later, I saw the shell of a cicada clinging to the purple bloom of a Blazing Star, and through…

A porch swing sways, and the chains in the eyehooks screwed into the rafters let out their lazy creaks as if this is a day of rest for them, too. Or nearly so. They still have to support the weight of the neighbor who pushes ever so lightly with her foot and feels the breeze…

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall the filmstrips that we used to see in grade school, those still images complete with captions projected onto a screen. Someone had to read those captions, and in my school I was often that someone. I suppose my teacher chose me because I wasn’t afraid to speak…

Nights are often the times when I feel the minutes of my life ticking by. Sunday nights, for whatever reason, are the worst nights for this dread that comes creeping toward me—perhaps it’s just the fact that I can see much more of my life behind me than ahead; I’m soon to be fifty-eight—and I…

Last week, I had the privilege of teaching at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and what a wonderful teaching experience it was. I got to see some old friends while also making a number of new ones. The participants were smart, engaged, generous . . .and they even laughed at my snail…

Because I’ll be gone next week, teaching at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Yellow Springs, Ohio, I’ve decided to post an extra entry this week. Here’s a snippet from the keynote address I’ll be making tomorrow evening in Yellow Springs. Each year, in July, my thoughts turn to my father, and I’m swept back to…

I received a triumphant message from a friend this morning about a breakthrough with the memoir she’s writing. She reports “a strange and wonderful happening,” the shedding of tears as she wrote, tears that came from the clear memory of her at a previous time, a time retrieved through the careful cataloging of specific concrete…

Summertime and the reading is easy. It’s that time when I can read the books I never find time to get to during the school year. I can range far and wide, from Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, to a re-reading of The Great Gatsby, to Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful…

I’m lying on my left side while the technician moves the transducer over my bare chest. Nine months after my stroke, and six months after my PFO closure, I’ve come to see whether the occluder that my cardiologist implanted over the hole in the septum between my atria is doing what it’s supposed to do,…