On Listening
I’ve just finished Townie, the recently published memoir by Andre Dubus III. I found his first two novels, House of Sand and Fog and The Garden of Last Delights, to be brilliant literary fiction and was eager to see what he’d do with nonfiction. Dubus addresses the...
Where I Get My Ideas
Given my love for the natural world, I hit the jackpot when my dear friend Diana lost her mind and brought home four baby chicks in early April. I immediately recognized that I’ll gleefully use chicken-raising in a novel (definitely in an urban setting, too; Diana...
Back To Details: Naming The Wilderness
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 right...
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 unit of...
Reaching for The Optimal Experience
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,...
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,...