Road Trip Report 4: Bluff Fort and Natural Bridges National Monument
Bluff Fort: The only original cabin still standing sits on local sandstone slabs to keep the wood from rotting. And keep in mind: no chain saw to cut down those cotton wood trees to get the logs! The nice thing about a road trip is that you do stumble across interesting things you didn't expect, didn't know about, weren't [...]
Road Trip Report 3: Ancient Pueblos – Chaco and Mesa Verde
The road trip report continues: Here I am in full hiking regalia, ready to tackle what turned out to be a rather tough climb to a plateau overlooking Pueblo Bonito, the best preserved ruin in Chaco Culture National Historical Park. We stopped there on our drive from Santa Fe to Durango, Colorado. Off the beaten path, the park lies [...]
Writing Exercise: Color List – Yellow
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 idea here is to come up with ways to evoke yellow without mentioning the color itself. One of the challenges in writing effective descriptions is getting the color just right. [...]
Road Trip Report 2: Texas Panhandle – Santa Fe
My report from our road trip to the Southwest continues, this time with a program in contrasts: The Texas Panhandle is flat, so flat you feel some higher power must have tried out the new iron there. Not that the cornfields in Illinois and Indiana, where we come from, aren't flat, but at least they grow tall corn! [...]
MFA Q&A: Keeping Your Day Job While Getting an MFA
This installment on the benefits and practicalities of getting an MFA in Creative Writing covers the issue of finding the time to pursue on an MFA in the midst of an already busy life. Q (Alison): Did you work full-time and go to school? Or were you able to focus on school full-time? How much time did you spend [...]
Road Trip Report 1: St. Louis – Oklahoma
Some impressions from the Big American Road Trip with my family, driving from Chicago to explore the Southwest this summer. City Museum St. Louis - the name does it a disservice. This is by far the coolest children's museum ever. Someone with a love for quirky junk turned an old shoelace factory into a giant wonderland. I mean who [...]