Platform? What is it?

April 7, 2011

Everyone in my classes is asking about the author “platform.” A woman last night said, “I think it’s getting out of control, all these blogs and websites and people putting so much time and effort into creating a presence on the Internet. Some day we’ll all be laughing about this.” Maybe. Some day, but not […]

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Coming Soon

March 4, 2011

Every week, I’m going to be posting a prompt, an excerpt with reflections about something I’m reading, and a quote or insight from a writer. The approaching spring is inspiring. Anaïs Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” “No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still […]

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Good writing. Duh

February 6, 2011

After reading a recent essay, I sent up a silent entreaty to the powers that be. Spare my writing students from coming across this. (I’m not linking to it yet, on purpose.) You see, they are working really really hard to make their memoirs powerful: to engage the reader with compelling scenes, a reliable (or […]

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A New Imprint

January 16, 2011

Clearly the book world is a bit topsy turvy these days, like a Chagall painting. Still, listen to this: The Pub Lab at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, has a new imprint. Lookout Books. Under the direction of Emily L. Smith, the imprint has published its first book, a collection of short stories […]

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A Thorny Undertaking

January 6, 2011

“It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of the innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable flutterings that agitate it.” I read this Montaigne quote sitting in a pub at the airport yesterday […]

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Writing about Winter Walking

December 16, 2010

Walking Beside a Creek Walking beside a creek in December, the black ice windy with leaves, you can feel the great joy of the trees, their coats thrown open like drunken men, the lifeblood thudding in their tight, wet boots. by Ted Kooser Flying at Night The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985

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Written from a newt’s point of view

December 2, 2010

My daughter Colette just started teaching fourth grade this year. A friend gave her a fire-bellied newt for her classroom. Colette invited her students to write from the newt’s point of view about his first week with the students. Colette has always inhabited other points of view in her own writing–since she was a little […]

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The Writing Journey: Where am I going?

November 22, 2010

“To write is to embark on a journey of which we do not know the destination. Thus, writing requires a great act of trust. We have to say to ourselves: ‘I do not yet know what I carry in my heart, but I trust it will emerge as I write.’ Writing is like giving away […]

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Why aren’t I writing?

November 3, 2010

I met with a writing client today who is revising a terrific memoir but has trouble getting to her desk: “I’ll do anything but write,” she told me. “I’ll clean the trim on the stove and scrub toilets before I’ll sit down and get to work. But once I do, I feel great, whole, happy.” […]

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A memoir about writing

October 20, 2010

“Above all, avoid melodrama. Understate the narrator’s emotional reaction. What the author withholds, the reader supplies. Establish and maintain the story’s cocreation; it’s essential.” The quote is from a memoir, Mentor, by Tom Grimes. Not only is this a compelling well-wrought story worth studying for its craft, it’s also full of gems–even entire teaching scenes […]

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