In the dark night of my habits, when sleep avoids me like a troublesome child, I find my life has become a series of other people’s requests, demands, interests and needs. Surely, it’s my fault, all mine, to have put myself on the lowest shelf, deep behind the...
Image: Kurt Vonnegut is one of the many writers from Indiana. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_from_Indiana Writing retreats can be expensive and difficult to schedule. How can busy parent-writers arrange to attend a reasonably priced writing retreat when...
A long, long time ago, when I was in my 20s, in grad school, and then living in Paris, I tried for a while to publish my short stories, poems, essays and one academic paper on the grotesque that my professor thought worthy. (I gave up on the research paper after five...
I teach memoir, but I mostly write poetry. This works well because of the inherent prose lessons in poetry concerning concision, sound, voice, facts and even plot. Concision & Precision: Poetry is usually* more concise than prose. (*Of course there are prose poems...
One day, summers ago, I saw my physical duplicate crossing a quiet side street in small town Michigan. A visit “home,” I was driving somewhere to somewhere else, a nondescript errand in a place often defined by them, I stopped at an unnecessary stoplight,...
