Get going on the road to writing (Empty road in Nevada, August 2011) Last Thursday, I was at a loss what to write for Friday's blog post. Uninspired, I thought, [...]
My writing studio in the attic of the Hemingway Birthplace Home, back when I was writer-in-residence. While I didn't particularly enjoy Roger Rosenblatt's Unless It Moves the Human Heart - [...]
Yours truly visiting the Ice Palace in St. Paul, MN Sunday, January 28, 2018 Inspired by a prompt in the current winter issue of Bella Grace, I kept [...]
It never fails to amaze me, even after so many years of working with texts, that, no matter how often you go over the same text, you still find [...]
Hemingway Birthplace Home, Oak Park, IL I just wrapped up serving as one of the judges in the Hemingway Shorts contest sponsored by the Hemingway Foundation of Oak [...]
Have you ever been startled by a sound you had never heard before? Stopped in your tracks, wondering what the hell was going on? Felice Benuzzi's unique adventure memoir [...]
"Eventually, I hear footsteps crunching along the side of the house through the glazed snow and my mother's navy blue sigh through the frozen air." from The Language of [...]
When I read, I underline words and phrases I like. Thanks to Liz Lamoreux's Inner Excavation and her idea of creating a word toolbox to "reveal the poet within," I've been [...]
A drab and wet November morning--perfect for revising at the Royal Coffee House. Monday evening two weeks ago I wrote a story. I wrote it sitting in my car. I plugged [...]
"Thanks to my dreams [and NaNoWriMo], November is one of my favorite and most amusing times," says novelist Shirley Letcher. Following up on last Monday's post, here's installment two of [...]
I am happy to welcome my writing friend Shirley Letcher as my guest blogger today. Shirley has been a teacher of music, theater and arts for over forty years, from [...]
Meeting other formidable writers is one of the great benefits of attending a writers residency. And so, last January, I had the great fortune of meeting Glen Finland during my [...]
Writing on the couch I've been tagged by my friend Gillian Marchenko, a former student of mine and author of the memoir Sun Shine Down, to participate in the #MyWritingProcess [...]
One insight from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones has already affected how I write. Here it is: "In the early seventies there was a study done on women and language [...]
Right now, this is the wall by my desk in my studio at the VCCA. I am still cutting paper into bits and pieces to work with text (see also my [...]
I love the cut and paste feature of Word, but every now and then, I resort to scissors and tape to arrange a text. Whenever I struggle with structure, I [...]
This very good question came up in my Advanced Memoir class recently, and my answer is twofold: A piece of writing is done when you feel you have been able [...]
Writing about real people, especially family, is probably the number 1 issue writers of personal stories worry about. But it is not just an issue for nonfiction writers... In my [...]
I haven't done the color list exercise in a while, mainly because I thought I had covered all the main colors already. For the uninitiated, the idea of the [...]
The month of March has crept up without me presenting a color list exercise yet, but here we go. I have one more color left, I think, and that's [...]
Since we already did red, which would also have been appropriate for February, the month of Valentine's Day, the color for this month is purple. At least there is [...]
Dusty Miller at the Lincoln Park Conservatory Even though there still is no snow outside here in Chicago, the color for this month is going to be white, perhaps [...]
Driving towards downtown Chicago recently It seems like all the color is gone now outside, and days like the one in my photo here are more prevalent. Thus, the [...]
Another month has begun, so it's time for another color list. The color for November will be brown as it seems a month rich with so many earthly things. [...]
Looking at what you stuff into your coat pockets offers a sketch of your character. When I sifted through the spoils from our road trip, half of what I [...]
What would fall be without pumpkins? So October's color is orange. For the uninitiated, the idea here is to come up with ways to evoke orange without mentioning the color [...]
September is the month of lushness - all the fruits and vegetables are ripe and deep in color. So this month's color is the most forceful of colors: red. [...]
The sun is still high up in the sky so the color for this month of August is the color of the sun - yellow. For the uninitiated, the [...]
Red, white and ____. You guessed it: In honor of Independence Day, the color of this month’s color list is blue. For the uninitiated, the idea here is to [...]
Today is the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death. An article by Jeffrey Meyers in the Wall Street Journal on Hemingway’s literary achievement reminded me of that. He died, [...]
Many years ago I took a writing class in which the instructor asked us to eavesdrop on a conversation in order to practice writing dialogue. One way to bring [...]
Since my color list for green was a success, I've decided to create, with your help, one color list each month. The idea remains to come up with nouns [...]
What words to use describe the sound of rain? We had terrific rains this morning in Chicago, the kind that darken the sky at eight in the morning. [...]
One of the challenges in writing evocative descriptions is getting the color just right. Making your reader see what you see will draw him or her into the scene, [...]
Every story develops its own integrity. There are things that belong in it, and things that don’t. If you’ve worked on it for a while, it will take on [...]
