Stylin’: Is It Dead or Alive?
Mavis Gallant, in her brief essay about style in writing, says, “The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive.” A piece breathes life, in part, from the style in which the writer has chosen to bring it to…
Read MoreMy Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson
As I dream of spring on this cold January day, I’m reading through some old letters from my mother, written in her widowhood, and I’m struck by the sound of my own voice in hers and the lesson she offers the writer I’ll one day be about how to let the details evoke a life:…
Read MoreI Was Wearing Them the Day: Touchstone Moments for the Fiction Writer
I’ve always been interested in the question of where the fiction writer finds material. I’m particularly interested in how the autobiographical gets transformed into fiction. My curiosity comes not from wanting to know about the personal lives of writers, but more from a desire to provide my students a way to increase the urgency and…
Read MorePreparing the Final Scene by Delaying Conflict
We start today with a passage from Richard Bausch’s story, “The Fireman’s Wife.” I’ve written about this story before on this blog, so I’ll only say that the story is about Jane who is close to leaving her marriage to Martin. At the end of the story, Martin has been injured while fighting a fire…
Read MoreWriting about Writing a Story
We’re starting Spring Semester classes at Ohio State, and I’ll be teaching the MFA fiction workshop as well as an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop. A semester for lying! I’m beginning, as I often do, with Tobias Wolff’s story, “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,” from Wolff’s first collection, In the Garden of the…
Read MoreHappy New Year
I’m thinking today of some of the New Year’s customs from my native southeastern Illinois where many of the people came from Kentucky and Tennessee. True to the southern tradition, cabbage and black-eyed peas were popular foods on New Year’s Day. The cabbage represented green folding money and the peas represented coins. Eating them meant…
Read MoreSlide Rules and Typewriters: A Memoir of Christmas Presents Past
Career Counseling My cousin taught high school math. At Christmas, he gave me complicated puzzles. One year he gave me a slide rule. I kept it a long time. It seemed like something I should be able to make work. It looked inviting with its ruler-like lines and numbers and the cool middle slide that…
Read MoreBeauty Is Still With Us
I heard the news early yesterday afternoon that the poet, Jake Adam York, had suffered a stroke at the age of forty. Because of my own recent stroke, I have statistics at the ready. Of all the people under the age of fifty-five who suffer a stroke of unknown causes and who have no risk…
Read MoreA Day at the Hospital
7:00 am: The woman at registration gives me an A+ for having all my paperwork properly filled out and ready to present. I don’t tell her I’m a teacher. I don’t tell her I have to believe that following all the rules will mean everything will work out just fine for me on this day…
Read MoreWriting Family Stories
I’ve been thinking about family stories lately, in part because I’ll be on a panel at the Associated Writing Programs annual conference in March along with Rebecca McClanahan, Mary Blew, Suzanne Bern, and Sharon Carmack (“Turning in Their Graves: Researching, Imagining, and Shaping Our Ancestors’ Stories), but also because the most glorious thing happened last…
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