Here on the day before Mother’s Day, I feel like writing a little bit about my own mother who has been gone now for 23 years. She was a grade school teacher for 38 years, beginning when she was 18, as was possible in 1928. She taught during the school year and then went to…

Oh, Lordy, here I go again, a splinter under my skin that I just have to worry up to light and air. This time, it’s the term, “trailer trash,” that’s got me worked up. A name for those folks in economic dire straits with fewer and fewer chances to rise above their circumstances. A category…

Yesterday in my fiction workshop, I was talking about the value of having something for the main characters of a story to do. I’ve always thought that jobs were useful in this regard. A character in a story can engage in all sorts of interesting activities on the basis of his or her job alone.…

An article in this morning’s Columbus Dispatch regarding e-readers and the downloading of library books has me thinking about how we’ve been quick to exchange an aesthetic experience for convenience. I already have nostalgia for the now defunct card catalog in libraries. How close are we to only having virtual libraries and no printed materials…

Last Thursday, I did a reading at Indiana University-East in Richmond, Indiana. The reading was in the library on campus, and the podium was in front of a wall of glass that looked out onto a grassy area at the edge of woodlands. Just as my excellent host, TJ Rivard, called me to the podium,…

Did you hear about the toddler who was served alcohol at an Applebees restaurant in Michigan? Apparently, some left-over mixed cocktails ended up in the apple juice. Now there’s a zing for your tyke to put a little extra giddyup in his roll! How interesting that when I first typed the last sentence above, I…

Sometime this past autumn Mort Castle, a writer near Chicago, asked me if I’d consider contributing a story to an anthology that he and co-editor, Sam Weller, were putting together. The anthology, Live Forever!, was to be a tribute to Ray Bradbury. I just learned yesterday that the anthology sold at auction last week to…

I just got back from the Western Carolina Literary Festival at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, from where I’d hoped to do a new post, but, gosh-darn it, the lit fest was just too hoppin’ of a place. So now, back on flat land, I write to report on the festival, the climate…

A non-teaching day for me today, so I spent some time this morning looking at the draft of what I hope will be my next novel. I finished the draft back in October, and I’ve been letting it rest all this time. I hadn’t looked at it until recently. Now I’m going through it chapter…

Yesterday, the first meeting of my Spring Quarter classes, I shared a Barry Lopez piece with my creative nonfiction workshop, a short piece of memoir called “Murder.” The essay opens with the then twenty-year-old Lopez setting forth from New Mexico on his way to see his girlfriend in Salt Lake City. He’s carefree, enjoying the…