The farmers are picking corn here in the Midwest. I drove along I-70 today, past corn fields ready for the harvest, and I thought about my father. It’s impossible for me to see dry cornstalks in the fields without thinking of him on Election Day in November, 1956, when he tried to unclog the shucking…

Brenda Miller writes about how paying attention to form in creative nonfiction can invite the writer to make “inadvertent revelations where the writer no longer seems in complete control.” She says, “Form essentially becomes the writer’s inky courage.” Here, then, is a writing activity I developed that asks the writer to work with metaphor as…

I grew up in a place where people came to town on Saturday nights to do their trading. My father  loafed with the other men in Tubby’s barber shop, or Buzz Eddie’s pool hall, and then went out to sit on the bench on the corner, still shooting the shit, while my mother and I…

As someone who writes both fiction and creative nonfiction, I’ve long been interested in the intersections between the two. More specifically (and this is probably more the teacher in me than the writer), I’ve been curious about how using both forms to approach the same material can deepen the writer’s intellectual and emotional responses. To…

(Autumn Semester classes have begun here at The Ohio State University, and my MFA workshop in creative nonfiction is off to a fast start. We talked last week about writing vertically down into the material to find the story of the writer’s thinking. Using Naomi Shihab Nye’s brief essay, “Mint Snowball,” as our model, we…

I just got back from teaching a workshop in the novel at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference in Montpelier. I had six first-time novelists in the workshop, and I’d seen about twenty-five pages of each manuscript before we all arrived in Montpelier. Some people had complete drafts of their novels, and…

In all honesty, I had no idea what I would write about today. Then I went out to mow the yard, and I noticed a Tonka Truck dump truck in the yard across the street, and later, I saw the shell of a cicada clinging to the purple bloom of a Blazing Star, and through…

A porch swing sways, and the chains in the eyehooks screwed into the rafters let out their lazy creaks as if this is a day of rest for them, too. Or nearly so. They still have to support the weight of the neighbor who pushes ever so lightly with her foot and feels the breeze…

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll recall the filmstrips that we used to see in grade school, those still images complete with captions projected onto a screen. Someone had to read those captions, and in my school I was often that someone. I suppose my teacher chose me because I wasn’t afraid to speak…

Nights are often the times when I feel the minutes of my life ticking by. Sunday nights, for whatever reason, are the worst nights for this dread that comes creeping toward me—perhaps it’s just the fact that I can see much more of my life behind me than ahead; I’m soon to be fifty-eight—and I…