And so it came to be that I wrote a novel, and my very nice agent found a very nice editor who liked the book. He made some very smart editorial suggestions, and I took nearly every one of them as I prepared the final manuscript. Then a very nice copy editor had fun marking…

I’m posting this entry earlier than usual this week because tomorrow I’ll be flying to Denver to be at the American Booksellers’ Association’s Winter Institute to promote my new novel that’s coming out this May. This is a post about a little boy, who was shy and sensitive, but also very curious. The boy that…

I’ve reached the age, sixty, when I sometimes meet people I knew a long time ago in my youth, and I can see the boys or girls they once were before time had their way with them.  I know the same holds true for me. Somewhere inside this “mature” body is the boy who once…

I just visited the fine folks of Eastern Kentucky University’s low-residency MFA program, The Bluegrass Writers Studio, and was reminded once again of all the warm and wonderful people who are part of this extended family we sometimes call our community of writers. I love seeing old friends and making new ones. Each time I…

The first time I applied for admission to an MFA program, I didn’t get in, so I applied to the same program the next year and was accepted. I’m stubborn that way. It takes a whole lot of stubborn to be a writer. I’m thinking about all the folks who are right now applying for…

When I was a boy, it was my family’s New Year’s Eve tradition to gather for an oyster soup supper, followed by a rousing round of Rook, a trick-taking card game, that pitted one set of partners against another. We played a lot of Rook in those days. My father and my uncles were competitive,…

Nearly each year at Christmas, my father and I went out into our woods and cut a cedar tree. I only remember us having a store-bought pine tree a handful of times. So the cedar tree was sort of a Christmas tree, but not really—not a red pine, or a white pine, or a scotch…

This Christmas season has me thinking about privilege—those who have it, and those who don’t; those who are in the mainstream, and those who aren’t. I grew up in a small rural area of southeastern Illinois, an area where most people were working class. I remember a few folks who appeared to be on another…

Last week, my advanced undergraduate creative nonfiction workshop read Patrick Madden’s “Writing the Brief Contrary Essay” from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Nonfiction. Madden talks about what he calls “essayistic subversion,” by which he means the essays that, to quote Phillip Lopate, “go against the grain of popular opinion.” Think, for example,…

We enter the Christmas season at the same time that I and my students are entering revision season. My students are preparing significant revisions of essays they’ve written this semester, while I’ve just finished going through my editor’s notes for my new novel, Late One Night, that’s coming out in May. Who knows what will…