I’m a writer who runs. I run because it calms me. It creates a quiet, peaceful place from which I can think more clearly, feel more deeply, write with more energy. “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois,” Flaubert said, “so that you may be violent and original in your work.” To…

My mother died on a brutally cold day in January in 1988. She was a grade school teacher for forty-one years, starting at a small country school when she was eighteen and retiring at the age of fifty-nine, the age I am now. Nights, when I was a small boy on our farm, I sat…

I’ve been asked to offer some further thoughts on designing and leading a creative writing workshop, and to respond I thought I’d talk a bit about how I do the novel workshop that I’ve been teaching in the summer at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference. This will give me a chance…

This week’s request to talk a bit about leading a writing workshop is timely because the Spring Semester begins at Ohio State today, and this evening, I’ll be meeting with my MFA fiction workshop for the first time. Here are some things I promise to do as I lead this workshop. I offer them here…

I remember on New Year’s Eve, when I was a boy, my father’s side of the family would gather for a supper of oyster soup and games of cards—usually either Pitch or Rook. This was in a day when we didn’t have cell phones that took pictures, when we didn’t live in a society that…

Feeling a little disorganized around the holidays? Imagine the way writers of memoirs must feel when faced with the task of giving shape and structure to the experiences that they’re trying to render on the page. I’ve had a request to talk about such things, so here goes. When writing a memoir, we’re faced with…

This week of Christmas, I’m responding to a request to talk a bit about publishing with independent presses. This is becoming an increasingly valid form of publication with several examples of small-press books garnering critical acclaim. The small presses exist to do what many New York houses are becoming leery of doing, namely giving a…

Continuing to respond to your requests for blog posts about particular topics, I turn my attention this week to the question of how I’m able to write about my parents again and again while coming at that material from fresh angles. To be honest, sometimes I worry about my returning to the story of my…

I remember a story about Yogi Berra trying to explain the fine arts of hitting a baseball to another player and then realizing that he really couldn’t explain. “Let me show you,” he said, and he proceeded to demonstrate. Yogi was also known to say at some point, “How can you hit and think at…

I want to thank everyone who responded to last week’s invitation to submit requests for future posts. I received some really good suggestions, and I meant to respond to one of them in this post, but then I saw the sad news that Kent Haruf, author of Benediction, Eventide, Plainsong, The Tie That Binds, and…