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This Place of Dirt and Dust
The peonies are in bloom. Each year, in time for Memorial Day, these fragrant flowers make their showy appearance. When I was a child, my mother made bouquets. She put a handful of gravel in the bottom of a coffee can wrapped in aluminum foil. She added the cut peonies and maybe a few irises…
Read MoreThe Shared Experience: Tips for Reading from Your Work
My latest guilty pleasure is watching people on YouTube react to their first time hearing a song. I can’t quite figure out why I love doing this so much, but I suspect it has something to do with the pleasure I get from seeing someone share my experience. When someone feels the emotional impact of…
Read MoreMy Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson
(In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m giving another life to this old post.) 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…
Read MoreAsk Lee
I’ve been doing this blog for several years, and from time to time I get the feeling that I’m repeating myself. When that happens, I know it’s time for me to ask you what you want to know. Please send me your questions. I’ll try to get to them in the weeks to come. If…
Read MoreLee K. Abbott and the Power of the Sentence
In remembrance of my former colleague, Lee K. Abbott, I offer the first sentence of his story, “Time and Fear and Somehow Love”: Since, as she conceived it, the letter was to be the final word on the subject, she endeavored to start slowly, then lead up to, as fine drama does, those moments of…
Read MoreYour Writer’s Journey
Here at the end of another semester, I’m reading work from my MFA students and thinking how privileged I am to be at least a small part of their writers’ journeys. Some of the students are completing their degrees and thinking about their next steps. I want to tell them, as I’m telling you now,…
Read MoreMuscle Up: Writing Stronger Sentences
We prose writers spend so much time thinking about characterization and plot that we often overlook the importance of the artfully crafted sentence. “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Ernest Hemingway famously said. “Write the truest sentence that you know.” His work strove for accuracy, honesty, and clarity, and it all…
Read MoreA Writer’s Faith
I hated working in the family garden when I was a teenager because, of course, I had teenager things to do, and all of that tilling and hoeing got in the way. Now, decades later, I’m eager to work up the soil in the raised bed Cathy and I rent from our community garden and…
Read MorePracticing the Techniques of Our Craft
For some reason, I’m thinking today about how I learned to drive. When I was around twelve years old, my father started letting me steer his Oldsmobile on the gravel roads near our farm in Lukin Township. I’d scoot close to him on the bench seat and steer while he operated the gas and, if…
Read MoreThe Bare Bones of Storytelling
Here’s an old joke about a boy who didn’t speak for the first five years of his life. Then, one night at the dinner table, he says, “These mashed potatoes are lumpy.” His parents are amazed. His father says, “Son, you can speak!” The mother says, “Why did it take you so long to say…
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