The Books and the Boys of Summer
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…
Read MoreAfloat
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,…
Read MoreInto the Fire: A Writing Exercise
I just got back from teaching at The Sun magazine’s three-day writing retreat in Rowe, MA. The retreat is called “Into the Fire: The Sun Celebrates Personal writing.” In all my sessions, but particularly in the last one that I offered on Saturday night, I invited participants to walk into that fire to see what…
Read MoreThe Beautiful Land: an Album
From time to time, I hear someone comment on what they consider to be the ugliness of the Midwest–the flat, agricultural land that for them holds no beauty or charm. Here, in a photo essay, is my response. In early summer, the wheat starts to change from green to gold. I remember going with my…
Read MoreThe Necessity of the Beautiful Sentence
The Columbus Dispatch recently ran a feature on the area’s scholar-athletes who are about to graduate from high school. They all responded to a series of interview questions. I took particular notice of the question that asked them to name their least favorite class. More than a few said that English was their least favorite…
Read MoreThe Art of the Snark
Is it just me, or is it true that somewhere along the line we became a culture that values (nay, practically demands) the snark? You know what I’m talking about, that sharp-tongued voice that cuts to the quick, that often mean-spirited comment meant to belittle. We hear it on our television shows and in our…
Read MoreComedy in Fiction
When I was in the first grade, my class took a field trip to Santa Claus Land, an amusement park in southwestern Indiana. My mother gave me a quarter in case I had need of it. Maybe I’m thinking about this because it’s Mother’s Day, or maybe because this happened in May when it was…
Read MoreStuff I Hear Myself Say on Panels
I just got back from the Creative Nonfiction Conference in Oxford, Mississippi, where for some odd reason the weather was much cooler and much rainier than here in Columbus, Ohio. So much for my plans to enjoy some hot, sunny days. That’s all right. Sometimes it’s better for a writer to delay his or her…
Read MoreTeaching at Writers’ Conferences
At the end of this week, I’ll be in Oxford, Mississippi, teaching a memoir workshop preceding the Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference and then sticking around to be on a panel during the conference proper. Thus begins the season of writers’ conference teaching with other visits to Rowe, Massachusetts; Yellow Springs, Ohio; and Montpelier, Vermont, to…
Read MoreTo My Students
Sunday morning, and I’m thinking of my students who are about to graduate, and another Sunday when I was fifteen, and my mother was working in the laundry at a nursing home in Sumner, Illinois, where the population was around 1,000 at the time. She had to be at work at 5am, which meant I…
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