Writers, like long-distance runners, tend to hit the wall at some point of the composing process, that point where the writing threatens to shut down, when we feel totally disengaged from our material, and the words are wooden, or won’t come at all. In my own case, this has led to hours of staring out…

I spent my teenage years in the small town of Sumner, Illinois, a town of around a thousand people. Before that, except for the six years my family spent in Oak Forest, a southern suburb of Chicago, where my mother taught third grade, I lived on a farm ten miles southwest of Sumner in Lukin…

When we construct a narrative, either in fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to build a believable world from the particulars we create or remember. Our first obligation, then, is to notice everything. Joseph Conrad says, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you…

In 2003, the University of Nebraska Press published my book, Turning Bones, as part of their nonfiction series, American Lives. The book was a blend of fact and fiction. I used information gathered about paternal ancestors I never knew to invent them on the page and to find the intersections between them and me. Part…

Today, I start with a memory of my mother in the kitchen on Sundays. She has prepared as much of our noon meal as possible before church, but she still has work to do. This is her day of rest, a day she doesn’t work in the laundry or the kitchen at the nursing home,…

I’m on leave and not teaching this semester, but in many ways it seems that I am, and that’s okay. Teaching is something I love. Sometimes I love it as much as writing. Sometimes I love it less. Sometimes I put on my crabby pants and grumble about all the time that being a teacher…

I’ve always thought that writing memoir, in some ways, is easier than writing fiction because the plot is already in place. We know the major players. We know what they did or didn’t do. We know the narrative arc of a certain slice of experience. We don’t have to make anything up. But, of course,…

I’m watching a swan as it glides across the lake. The sun is out. The temperature is moderate. For February, in the Midwest, it’s not a bad day at all. I’m thinking about how our writing lives can sometimes be like this—effortless, beautiful—and how most of the time they aren’t. For the most part, I…

I drove across Indiana today in heavy snow. Visibility was poor on I-70 between Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Traffic was slow. I saw cars off the road and a multiple vehicle accident. I kept going. I found the track and I stayed in it. Hmmm. . .sort of like writing a novel. The first novel…

My cousin invited me to look through some old family photos she’d inherited from her grandmother, who was my aunt. It was a wonderful evening, but the true gift of it appeared at the end of the many photos we saw. I found myself picking up a portrait, roughly 8” x 10”, of a family,…