We’re off to a start of a new semester here at Ohio State University, and I’m teaching an advanced undergraduate creative nonfiction workshop. I came up with a writing activity for our first meeting–with a nod toward Dinty Moore whose own activity inspired this one–and I want to pass it along to you. The activity…

I’m reading Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Early in the book, when Smarsh is tracing the courtship and eventual marriage of her grandparents in rural Kansas, I hit a passage that I just have to read to my wife. “She’s talking about our…

Here we are on the cusp of a new year, a time for resolutions and new beginnings. If you’re a writer, it’s time to set your sights on the projects ahead of you. With that in mind, I offer up these ten starters for anyone who likes to tell stories, whether you call yourself a…

This is my Christmas Eve blog post, and I want to use it to thank all of you who bless me—friends, family members, students, and those who read what I write, particularly those regular readers of this blog. To be honest, it sometimes gets tough to come up with new posts, but I keep trying…

For the better part of my youth, my father, and then later I, would go into the woods on our eighty-acre farm in southeastern Illinois and cut a cedar which would serve as our Christmas tree. Needless to say, it was always a tree whose branches had grown according to nature’s will, which is to…

Last night, Cathy and I were driving up I-71 on our way into Columbus for a holiday party, and she was whistling “Let It Snow.” She stopped and said, “When you whistle, do you blow out, or do you suck in?” “I blow out,” I said, “but when I first learned to whistle, I sucked…

Welcome to the end of the semester, that time when desperation is palpable among my undergraduate students, and who knows, maybe even my MFA students, too, but they’re too cool to show it. Relax, I want to tell everyone. You’ll get everything done, and you’ll do it well, or maybe not so well, but you’ll…

Cathy and I were watching one of those holiday baking shows on the Food Network last night. The final challenge in this episode was to make a cream puff Christmas tree. In the midst of the preparation, the host threw a curve ball at the contestants. They would also have to make a chocolate topper…

After struggling to complete my junior year of college, I withdrew from school, went back to southeastern Illinois, and got a job as a pressman in a tire repairs manufacturing plant. I ran presses that molded rubber into plugs or patches. Day after day—eight hours a day, and sometimes ten—I loaded my press with slabs…

Our living is full of subtext. In a work of fiction or nonfiction, a writer is wise to pay attention to Henry James’s advice: “Try to be one of those on whom nothing is lost.” The writer’s job is to know the story taking place beneath the observable story. Often the resonance of a piece…