Category: The Writing Life

  • Family Archaeology

    All my life, my mother had confided in me, sharing her frustrations over finances, accounts of babies she fell in love with as a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit, gossip about her friends, and visions for a remodeled house she never managed to get approved by the city. But in her later years,…

  • Where There’s One, There’s Many: Accessing Early Childhood Memories as Story Material

    A year after my father died, my wife demanded that I see a therapist, an idea to which I wasn’t averse given the positive outcomes from counseling I’d experienced at shaky moments in my past.  Michelle and I had spent my father’s last full night with him in his hospital room where I believe to…

  • Where There’s One, There’s Many: Accessing Early Childhood Memories as Story Material

    A year after my father died, my wife demanded that I see a therapist, an idea to which I wasn’t averse given the positive outcomes from counseling I’d experienced at shaky moments in my past.  Michelle and I had spent my father’s last full night with him in his hospital room where I believe to…

  • Commencement Remarks

    The following are remarks given at the May 2024 Commencement of the MFA Program at Queens University of Charlotte: In general, I don’t like giving speeches. Giving a speech requires standing in front of a group of people while they stare at you… and it also requires talking. I’m a writer. I like to write…

  • On Trusting

    I used to go to therapy once a week in a building full of therapists. I’d sardine into a tight elevator with other people going to see their therapists and we’d pardon ourselves quietly as we squeezed past each other into long hallways of locked doors. After my therapist opened her door with her half-smile—I…

  • On Agenting

    I started out with myself (who else?). Andy and I wrote a textbook proposal for a publisher who requested it, and when they turned it down, our advisor said, “It’s a good proposal; you should go out with it.” So we did. This was before email. Before we knew it we had two publishers bidding…

  • Respecting Mystery

    The core labor of my writing life is the process of coaxing characters into the world of my fiction. It’s a process analogous to a portrait painter working for that crucial moment, as Paul Klee described it, where the free inspiration of the artist must yield to the demands of the thing coming into being:…

  • Lessons in Work/Life Balance

    Monday morning, make the lists; divide them by church and state, by job: bookselling, bookmaking, bookteaching. Start with the list for bookselling because it is made of tasks that can be completed, instead of ethereal images, snips of song, effluvia, menu items, instead of Mandy’s problem with POV, Ben’s novel outline he sent you though…

  • Seventeen Back and Forth Scenes on Sitzfleisch Or: What does it mean to write for theatre?

    Scene 1 During the early days of the pandemic, while we were all glued to our screens, theatre ended. The option of going places was replaced by the necessity of staying put. Attending a play requires a pilgrimage while writing a play (like all writing) requires sitzfleisch: sitting, staying in place. It’s a discipline to…