On Craft: Scene or Narration?

 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...

The Mystery of Metaphor

                        “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 Clarity

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...

Blame The Weather

To those readers in winter-affected areas:  is the weather making everything feel like extra work to you?  It is to me.  Just getting dressed is a shivering labor involving long underwear under my jeans, a fleece over my shirt, wool socks as thick as my thumb....

On Structure…an approach

Have I been out to start the primary research of hunting caches yet?  Okay, I’m a wimp.  The ground is snow-covered, temperatures frigid.  Yes, my chocolate Lab, Hannah, gets a daily hike in the woods.  But geocaching involves moving more slowly than she and I do,...