Elizabeth

Many years ago I took a writing class with Eileen Myles. For one of the exercises she led us through, we watched an old movie—black and white, eerie and dramatic—with the sound turned off. As we watched it, we wrote. We wrote the scene, the dialog, descriptions of unscrolling setting. Now when I revisit my […]

In class recently, one of my students at home with two young children talked about having left the house the evening before to write. She hadn’t been able to write all week, but in the twenty-minute reprieve she wrote three pages! There is something magical for me, too, about getting out of the house—even when

According to news reports, Gregory Pardlo is a 46-year-old man who appears to be enrolled both in Columbia’s MFA in Creative Non-fiction Program and CUNY’s PhD in English. He already has a master’s degree in Poetry from NYU. These degrees may sound impressive but they speak to me of a search for financial support for

Anne Lamott just posted some thoughts on FB for her birthday, including the idea that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. What writing lacks is internal certainty. To face the unscrolling blue line across the paper, a thin thread, and my own crabbed handwriting crawling out on it—a bridge

In the mornings I write by hand. A writer friend who also has two young kids said, Why would you want to add an extra step? But I am looking for every way to evade the voice of doom and doubt, to connect directly to the writer, this being in me, unexpected even after all

I went to the Woodstock Writer’s Festival in March.  My favorite part was Tim Donahue’s interview with Abigail Thomas.  I didn’t take notes, so this is what I remember: Somehow, it came up that Abigail had recently tried to read Kerouac’s On The Road but couldn’t finish it. “You hated it?” asked Tim (who was

I go volunteer in the classroom on Wednesday mornings, and recently I’ve been teaching story writing to my kids’ second- and third-grade class. Yesterday I wrote out a paragraph with six parts for them to fill in as a way to launch a story, and it struck me as something useful, startlingly clear, that I

Alfredo Corchado, author of Midnight in Mexico Descent into Darkness panel When he had second thoughts, didn’t think he could write this sweeping nonfiction book about the drug wars in Mexico, he went to see his agent. Agent: What do you think about when I say Mexico? Alfredo: (Thinks of different things, begins to explain)