One of the best responsibilities of being a writer is having to read. Why must we read? Because in reading we writers join a conversation with our peers, living and dead. We study the way other writers approach storytelling and scene-making. We...
Channeling Nora
It is hard to believe that Nora Ephron is dead. She was too full of vitality to die—and much too funny. If anyone could outwit death I’d cast my vote with her. There is much to celebrate about a multi-talented woman like Nora (no, I never knew...
Writers Helping Writers
Last week I was up in Portland recording a podcast on Late Night Library with poet Dorianne Laux. Late Night Library is the brainchild of University of Oregon MFA graduates Paul Martone (fiction) and Erin Hoover (poetry). Each month two...
Imagination and Its Uses
For the last few days I was mostly bed-bound, plagued by some inexplicable deep exhaustion and an everywhere-achiness I can’t seem to label. It’s allergy season here in the Willamette Valley, and for a while I thought that maybe I’d been stricken...
A Story’s “Container”
Every once in a while I run across a piece of writing advice that strikes me as absolutely right and highly usable, the perfect “gadget” for prying me out of a tight writing spot. Who knows if others would find these particular “gadgets”...
Theater Envy and Collaborative Defiance
A few days ago my partner and I watched a documentary film about Sam Shepard directing his play The Late Henry Moss. The work was loosely based on Shepard’s father’s life, and it was being brought to life by the formidable actors Sean Penn and...
The Perils of Sitzfleisch
I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting e-mails and tossing out snail mail. Attend! Like! Join! Contribute! All this exhorting. It takes a heap-load of aggressive ignoring to maintain a modicum of focus these days. But because of my...
The Call to Be Fierce
I’m back, blogging again after a little more than a year’s hiatus. In that year of not-blogging two things happened: I began doing Bikram yoga and my mother died. Other things happened too, of course, but those two things come to mind first. They...
Reading Kesey
In these days of Wikileaks, oversharing on Facebook, and one-click answers from Google, library research has been relegated to the purview of yesteryear historians and diehard scholars, and the arrival of a cache of new information is often met...
The Myth of Fingerprints
“It was the myth of fingerprintsI’ve seen them all and manThey’re all the same” from Paul Simon’s “The Myth of Fingerprints” One of my primary tasks these days is reading MFA applications, a Himalayan mountain of them. We have close to 400...