One of the rewards of the writing life is teaching writing. I taught composition for some years at a US military base in Naples, Italy. I remember a young soldier who had grown up poor in the Caribbean. He struggled…
Blog Archives
12 Reasons You Need a Writing Group
You just don’t feel like writing today/aren’t inspired/lost faith. . . . The group meets on Wednesday. They expect some work from you and don’t really care about your drama. Besides, they’ve been there and pushed through and expect you…
Creating My Red Summer
The first plot piece of my novel in progress (current title: Out of the Red Summer) was set when I was in grade school. I was maybe 10 when my parents took me to see All the Way Home, the…
Tagged with: Agee, All the Way Home, Carpetbag Theater, Creating a novel, Death in the Family, Inspiration for Novel, Knoxville, Knoxville Race Riot, Maurice Mays, Novel themes, Summer of 1915
Posted in New novel
Posted in New novel
How did s/he get that way?
Last week, I led a workshop on memoir writing at a local senior center. Amazing stories came out, funny, sad, and precious. Here’s a variant of an exercise we did that I think would be useful for writers, and just…
Listeners in Airports
Recently, a bit of snow in Philadelphia so overwhelmed American Airlines, that we got home 24 hours later than planned. [Insert here the litany of gate changes, delays, cancellations, rescheduling, cancellation, disappearing ticket agents, endless holds on phone, airport shut…
“Tell me how you lost.”
I’m taking Silvia to gymnastics. She scrambles into her car seat and demands a story. “About what?” I have in mind the continuing saga of the Tudor family: warring cousins, blood, crowns, The Tower. Far away fantasy. But she wants…
Dialect and the hamster/grandfather issue
My novel in progress is set here in Appalachia a century ago, when dialect was strong. Which raises a constant writer’s dilemma: verisimilitude and historical accuracy versus out-of-area comprehension. One doesn’t want to replicate my grandfather/hamster confusion. I grew up…
Tagged with: Appalachian dialect, hamsters, historical novel, teaching developmental reading, writing dialect
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
Cheese straws and lies
In my novel in progress, set in Tennessee, 1919, the cook makes cheese straws for a garden party that never happens. Too bad. They’re easy, addictive, and very southern. The recipe follows, adapted from Nathalie Dupree’s New Southern Cooking. I…
Glockenspiels, not Glocks!
A billboard near me (Knoxville, TN) proposes December 3 as Glock Day. As in: Celebrate this season of joy by gifting your loved ones a major handgun. I do not believe that this is a solution on any micro or…
Where invention comes from, maybe
This the Palazzo Donn’Anna, in Naples, the memory of which launched my second historical novel, Swimming in the Moon (2013). My Italian teacher grew up in the vast apartment on the second floor, full of marble, Venetian glass, and monumental…
Tagged with: fiction writing, historical novel, Inspiration for Novel, Palazzo Donn'Anna
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
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