Family Rituals and Flash Fiction
Here we are in the post-holiday time, and I’m thinking about family rituals. My father’s side of the family had a habit of gathering on New Year’s Eve for an oyster soup supper followed by a rousing game of cards—Rook usually or sometimes Pitch, both of them bidding games. The competition could get fierce, and…
Read MoreBeyond the Pain: A Writing Exercise
I’ve been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Miami University here in Ohio the past few days, and one day I led a writing activity for people in our prose workshop. Both fiction and nonfiction writers went through the following steps to great success. They found genuine, strong voices while also developing a deeper…
Read MoreThe Joy of Work in the New Year
Cathy and I didn’t waste any time saying goodbye to Christmas. We took down the tree and all the decorations and stored everything neatly in our basement before New Year’s Eve. We rearranged the furniture in our living room and did a top to bottom house cleaning. We’ve made it through the holidays, and here…
Read MoreThe Beauty of the Design: Some Thoughts at the End of the Year
Yesterday at our Christmas lunch, the conversation turned to movies we’d recently seen. I mentioned that Cathy and I had watched The Power of the Dog. “Was it grim?” one of our lunch companions asked, and I told her, yes, it was grim, but it was also beautiful. “Did it make you feel grim when…
Read MoreMaking Room for Contradictions
The car, a luxury sports model, sat on the overgrown grass in front of a ramshackle house in my wife Cathy’s hometown. Ordinarily, I’d identify the specific make and model, but I want to protect the privacy of the owner. I couldn’t help but notice the car as I ran by because it was so…
Read MoreI’m Mr. Blue: Thoughts on Writing Essays
It’s Christmas night, and I’m in the backseat of my parents’ Chevrolet Belair or the Ford that preceded it, or else riding between them in the cab of my father’s Chevy pickup, and I’m four, or five, or six, or seven, and we’re coming home from another Christmas spent with my mother’s side of the…
Read MoreWhere’s the Heat?
Now that cold weather has come here in central Ohio, our orange tabby, Stella the Cat, often hovers over a heat vent waiting for the furnace to kick on. She’s a heat seeker, our girl, and she knows the parts of the house that heat up the quickest. She’s patient, knowing from experience that sooner…
Read MoreTurn On the Lights and Be Fully Present
Cathy and I put up our Christmas trees this weekend. We have a prelit flocked artificial tree in our family room, and we also put a tree on our front porch. The flocked tree was new last year, and wouldn’t you know it, the lights on one of the sections wouldn’t work. The company had…
Read MoreTips for Writing Scenes
Many years ago, I performed regularly in community theatre productions. I still recall the intense experience of standing backstage listening for my cue. Behind the flats, I was in the real world, but just barely. When my cue came, I stepped out into an imaginary world, transformed into whatever character I was playing. With…
Read MoreThe Art of Daydreaming
Yesterday, Cathy and I decided to put our community vegetable garden plots to bed for the winter. We picked the last of the spinach from our cool weather planting and let the kale and the lettuce, which had been prolific, succumb to the frosty mornings we’ve been having. I’d read that the frost often made…
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