Memory as Resurrection: A Writing Activity

Cathy and I have had an odd feeling after selling her family home. She still tears up from time to time when she realizes our attachment to our native land has just become a bit less firm. For the past nine years, she’s been in that home four days out of each month, as she…

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Writing Toward Understanding

I just got back from a family reunion in southeastern Illinois, and next month I go to my fiftieth high school class reunion. The events have me thinking about a writing exercise that should work for both fiction and creative nonfiction. Maybe you’ve had the experience of being close to someone and then drifting apart,…

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My Mother Gives Me a Writing Lesson

(In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m giving another life to this old post.) 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…

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An Object Exercise for Prose Writers

Thanks to a friend, my wife Cathy now has a new hairstyle. It’s short and spiky just like this post is going to be. This is a writing activity for those who write memoir. Recall a time in your life when you acquired something new. Maybe it was a hairstyle, or a fashion, or maybe…

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Beyond the Pain: A Writing Exercise

I’ve been teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Miami University here in Ohio the past few days, and one day I led a writing activity for people in our prose workshop. Both fiction and nonfiction writers went through the following steps to great success. They found genuine, strong voices while also developing a deeper…

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Mad Libs for Creative Nonfiction Writers

Cathy and I, the past few years, have been opening our home on Thanksgiving Day, providing a welcome table to anyone who might need a place to go. Of course, we’re disappointed that the pandemic has made that impossible this year, but our gathering’s loss is a small price to pay for the sake of…

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Struggle and Empathy

We’ve reached the final week of January, which always feels significant to me. A native Midwesterner, I’ve always thought of winter as an endurance test, and each signpost along the way—the end of January, Valentine’s Day, the NCAA basketball tournament, etc.—a mark that brings us closer to spring. Here in the Midwest, we earn our…

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