Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn Quarter classes at Ohio State, where I teach. I’m starting my 30th year as a teacher, eleven of them here at OSU, and each year, when it’s time to think about walking into that classroom the next day, I recall a story from some years back, when I…

When I began this blog, I promised I’d tell you the least you need to know about writing, publishing, teaching, and other stuff. Well, today’s entry gives you some of that “other stuff,” a bit of the culture from my native southeastern Illinois, where right now it’s the heart of chowder season. Not chowder as…

When I was teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, I offered a class on narrative structure that used Stuart Dybek’s short-short story, “Sunday at the Zoo,” as an example. If you’re interested, you can find the story in the first edition of Sudden Fiction, edited by Robert Shapard and James…

I’m back from teaching in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Workshop and I’ve been trying to get used to not having the stimulation of excellent readings by faculty and participants alike, thought-provoking craft talks, and the excitement of the daily workshop that I led. I had a group of six talented writers…

Okay, I confess. I never met a horrible pun or a corny joke that I can resist. The dumber the better. Q: What did the farmer say when he lost his tractor? A:  “Hey, where’s my tractor.” See what I mean? There’s something about the naked admission that the joke is stupid that wins me…

Last night, I started a Facebook group for folks who grew up in  my hometown, Sumner, Illinois. As some of you already know, I lived on a farm ten miles from Sumner until I started the third grade, at which time my mother took a teaching position in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southwestern suburb of…

An Associated Press news article reports this morning that the rural United States now holds only 16% of the population. In 1910, the year my mother was born, 72% of the population lived in rural areas. It’s no surprise to me that more and more of us live in cities, but one sentence in this…

Last week, I spent five days teaching a creative nonfiction workshop for ten high school students who were participating in our Young Writers Workshop at Ohio State University. Twenty-eight rising juniors and seniors from Columbus City Schools gathered for a week-long immersion into the study of creative writing. This is a residential program that allows…

My special correspondent in Southeastern Illinois offers up a report from this year’s Richland County Fair in Olney. The traditional foods are back: funnel cakes, lemon shake-ups, corn dogs, cotton candy, salt water taffy, pork burgers, etc. My correspondent reports that the 4-H Club’s lemon shakeups were the best from all the stands offering that…

It’s a stormy day here in Columbus, Ohio. One of those days that starts out hot and humid and then by mid-afternoon the skies darken and for a time everything goes still. Solar landscape lights come on in people’s flowerbeds, the clouds deepen, the scent of the rain to come is just a whiff in…