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In the morning yesterday on the playground after the bell rang for the start of school, my kids’ teacher said to me, “I’m letting them play. They love to play.” She said, “I realize watching them how we’ve stopped playing, as if we’ve forgotten how. But they just begin, immediately.” Around us an improvisation of […]

This year I’ve been teaching my way through seven key story steps by finding examples in memoirs, novels and stories to serve as models for our own projects—mine and my students’ books and stories. I’ve read the books I draw from, of course—Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot

“The more important a call to action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel about answering it. But to yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.” Steven Pressfield My kids still resist bathing. We’ve made certain days

Writing about writing in cars from last week’s post reminded me about bathroom readers. When I was twenty-one, I lived for a summer in a household of young farmers and other folks recently graduated from college. I was trying to be a writer. I had several stories I was working on, and I began to

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