One thing I’ve learned is that most of us are passionate about a couple of things and how much those interests emerge as defining parts of our identities. I don’t know exactly when I fell in love with being able to identify, for example, the wildflowers that...
Would you think for a moment about your favorite novels? What about them do you remember most? My memories are of tense or revelatory scenes that came alive as strongly as if a staged play were in front of me. (For our purpose, let’s define a scene as a a...
I know the jokes about writers. We work in our pajamas, for one. We’re obviously at home too, so we ought to be able get the laundry done while we work. And since our time is our own, it’s only logical that we can run the dog to the vet, clean up the dishes,...
“To a poet nothing can be lost.” Samuel Johnson Something happened a few days ago that got me thinking about depicting emotion when I write, and how often I find my way to it through metaphor. Winter had reasserted itself, so Hannah’s forest...
On Sunday it was fifty-four degrees, the air edgeless, soft and pale yellow. A young fisherman in a navy sweatshirt and baseball cap was on the edge of the river where Hannah swims; he took his simple hook and line upstream a bit when Hannah leapt from the bank to...