I’ll be teaching a workshop called The Achievable Climb: Writing the Book-Length Work at the Madeline Island School of the Arts in Northern Wisconsin October 8 – 12th.

The workshop will be useful to those working on either a memoir or fiction project. If you have a manuscript underway, or just an idea for one you’d like to begin, I’ll give you lots of ideas, exercises, feedback, and support. It’ll be a great time to get experienced, constructive instruction from me, to join the company of others “making the climb” who can give you helpful comments, and … Read More

I just got back from a wonderful week in California, taking a trip down memory lane as part of celebrating (and taking the sting out of) my 65^th birthday.

I’ve been back to Palo Alto and Stanford a number of times since I moved away in the fall of 1974.  But there was something special about returning to the scene of my youth just as I was turning 65.  I went to Stanford right after I graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1969, as a twenty-two year old Stegner Fellow, got my Master’s (MFA, though it … Read More

The New York Times published several pieces on Reading and Writing in the Sunday Review section on March 18, 2012.  At the time I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s eloquent essay called “My Life’s Sentences,” which I planned to reread sometime.  I kept the whole section, intending to read the other pieces, “when I had time.”  Of course I forgot about it all, until recently when I was reading Francine Prose’s (how did she get a last name like that?) book called Reading like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who want to Write Them… Read More

How heartbreakingly true it is that you can’t believe it when they’re gone.  Always just a phone call away, and then suddenly—you can’t reach them ever again.  You can’t pick up the phone and hear “Hey, darlin’” as you have so many times before.  A voice I heard for what?  Forty-seven years.  Since I was a senior in high school and Dale Davis was my speech teacher.  What I wouldn’t give to hear that voice again, the particular timbre of which I know so well!  How distinctive it was, how Dale.  “Hey, Darlin’. ” I can hear it only … Read More

While Cheryl Strayed was in Minneapolis as part of her book tour for Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail, which I posted about previously, I went to hear her twice, once for a reading and once for a reading/talk called “The Art of Memoir.”  I’m hoping to pass along to you some of what she had to say about the book, her writing life, and memoir.  She’s so great, such a pro, so well-spoken, and so generous in her answers to questions.  Given the book’s popularity, you can find about a zillion interviews with … Read More

I think you would find it equally fine, but I do admit I’m prejudiced.  Cheryl was a student of mine in a graduate level fiction writing class in the fall of 1990, when she was senior at the University of Minnesota.  It was that … Read More

I knew Kathy briefly in 2000 when we shared a house in Key West where we were attending the Seminar on Memoir.  I liked her a lot, and I greatly admired her memoir The Red Devil: to Hell with Cancer—and Back.  You can read about Kathy and her books in the Times obituary below.  I emailed her in 2008 when I was planning a trip to Udaipur, India, where Kathy had spent some time learning Hindi.  She was generous in sharing contacts in Udaipur and … Read More

I just had a fun weekend in Madison, which I had never been to.  It is a cool, hip, funky, populist town where everyone looks cool, hip and funky.  On Williamson Street where we were staying, I saw a guy sweeping his sidewalk whose hair was pretty much like a large, flattened broom head sticking straight up on top of his skull, held upright by some spackling substance. Very … Read More

“Along with prose pieces by several students we discuss, in detail, rendering our way through the story line by line as if it were poetry, that early masterpiece of Ernest Hemingway—“Indian Camp.”  Four pages

… Read More