Carol's Blog

I saw this on a student’s email signature and had to post it. A woman in a class this week talked about her six-year-old son saying something to her like, “You’re always reading, Mom. Nose in a book.” At the time she was sitting on her couch devouring Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club. She read […]

I’ve been telling my students this week about the cluster: you put a word that represents something important in the middle of a large unlined piece of paper. Draw a circle around it. Let ideas and chains of thought spill onto the page: spoke, new idea, circle it, spoke, related idea–all stemming from this central […]

Playwright and New Yorker writer Paul Rudnick says: “As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It’s a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you […]

Edna O’Brien was working in a chemist’s shop in Dublin when she discovered a slender volume called Introducing James Joyce: a selection of Joyce’s prose,with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. She later said: “I opened it to a section from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue […]