While this day is a celebration of the birth of our nation, I think it’s also a day to reflect and, of course, celebrate what makes the U.S. of A such a great nation. I appreciate all the women writers, poets, photographers, painters–artists–who dare to...
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...
Last night, before I went to bed, I mentally planned my writing week. I’d start by rewriting a piece I wrote about Raymond Chandler’s quote: “ The faster I write the better my output. If I’m going slow, I’m in trouble. It means I’m pushing the words instead of being...
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,...
