Blog

I’ve just come home from the Antioch Writers’ Workshop Fall Retreat, where today I listened to writers talk about how important it is for them to find the time to do what makes them happy—moving words about on the page. I’ve been among folks who enjoyed the gift of time this weekend. They made significant progress with their projects. They had the benefit of being with folks of like mind, folks who understand the passion for the written word as well as the frustrations that are par for the course for anyone who makes writing a life choice. One of [...]

We’re one week away from the official publication date for my new craft book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, so I thought I’d post the acknowledgment page from the book along with a selection from “The Writing Life” section that pays tribute to my mother and to all she unknowingly taught me about what it takes to courageously face the blank page. First, the acknowledgment page: My fourth grade teacher once told me I had no imagination. I’ve never forgotten. This is a book for all those who dare to dream and to devote themselves [...]

We’re two weeks away from the official publication date for my craft book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, something I never could have seen coming when I started this blog way back when. Before this blog, I’d never done much writing about writing. Instead, I’d done a good bit of talking about writing around the workshop table. At first, I didn’t want to do this blog. My web designer had to convince me it was necessary to draw traffic to my author site. I’m glad I listened. I was hesitant because I felt that time [...]

Last week, Cathy and I went to our local humane society and adopted a cat, an eight month-old orange tabby we named Stella. As we understand it, female orange tabby cats are rare, so Stella is special indeed for all sorts of reasons. Our poems, stories, essays, novels, memoirs are all special as well, marked by how unique they are, coming as they do from our own particular visions and styles. In other words, the things we write are special because they can only come from us. Give everyone a single premise, for example, and invite them to put it [...]

When I was a boy on our farm in southeastern Illinois, my parents had a telephone that was on a party line, which meant that if a small boy chose, as this one did, to pick up the phone from time to time, he might be able to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations. My grandmother caught me one day and made it clear that I was a very bad boy to listen in on what our neighbors were saying. My mother reinforced this when she told me that eavesdropping was something polite people just didn’t do. It strikes me now [...]

Autumn Semester classes get underway this week at Ohio State University, and as they do, I’ll enter my thirty-sixth year of teaching. I know I’ve written about this before, but two stories bear repeating. My mother taught elementary school for thirty-eight years. She found plenty to keep her busy in her retirement. She helped my father on the farm, she worked as a housekeeper and laundress at a local nursing home, she tutored students who needed extra help with their lessons. Then the day came when she stopped working at the nursing home, and my father died, and I moved [...]

I’ve just returned from a week at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, where I taught a workshop focusing on the novel. Six novelists sat in a room with me for two hours and fifteen minutes each day, and together we workshopped excerpts from their novels in progress. We also used The Great Gatsby to think a bit more deeply about everything from structure to characterization, detail, point of view, and language. We even found time for some corny jokes—okay, I found time for the jokes, all with a pedagogical purpose, of course. Here’s one: A frog [...]