My post last week, in which I offered some advice to those about to graduate with their MFAs, got a good deal of response along with a request to offer more information about the sorts of jobs that might be possible. I decided, then, to go to folks more expert than I, recent grads from…

I’m thinking about all the MFA students these days who are making the turn into the homestretch. Only a couple of months to go until thesis defense time and then graduation. Exciting times, but also nail-biting, teeth-grinding, hair-pulling times. I remember my own anxiety about my post-MFA life, a life that included teaching five sections…

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember the old thermometers, the ones that you had to keep under your tongue for four minutes, the ones you had to shake down with an expert snap of the wrist, the ones that made you squint in order to make out the level of the mercury that…

Mavis Gallant, in her brief essay about style in writing, says, “The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive.” A piece breathes life, in part, from the style in which the writer has chosen to bring it to…

As I dream of spring on this cold January day, I’m reading through some old letters from my mother, written in her widowhood, and I’m struck by the sound of my own voice in hers and the lesson she offers the writer I’ll one day be about how to let the details evoke a life:…

I’ve always been interested in the question of where the fiction writer finds material. I’m  particularly interested in how the autobiographical gets transformed into fiction. My curiosity comes not from wanting to know about the personal lives of writers, but more from a desire to provide my students a way to increase the urgency and…

We start today with a passage from Richard Bausch’s story, “The Fireman’s Wife.” I’ve written about this story before on this blog, so I’ll only say that the story is about Jane who is close to leaving her marriage to Martin. At the end of the story, Martin has been injured while fighting a fire…

We’re starting Spring Semester classes at Ohio State, and I’ll be teaching the MFA fiction workshop as well as an advanced undergraduate fiction workshop. A semester for lying! I’m beginning, as I often do, with Tobias Wolff’s story, “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,” from Wolff’s first collection, In the Garden of the…

I’m thinking today of some of the New Year’s customs from my native southeastern Illinois where many of the people came from Kentucky and Tennessee. True to the southern tradition, cabbage and black-eyed peas  were popular foods on New Year’s Day. The cabbage represented green folding money and the peas represented coins. Eating them meant…

Career Counseling My cousin taught high school math. At Christmas, he gave me complicated puzzles. One year he gave me a slide rule. I kept it a long time. It seemed like something I should be able to make work. It looked inviting with its ruler-like lines and numbers and the cool middle slide that…