In the summer when I was sixteen, I read great gobs of Anna Karenina with my feet over my head. I had been somberly informed that you retain information better if there is more blood in your brain. This seemed…
Blog Archives
Gold in the green beans. Why?
My father grew up in Brooklyn, during the Great Depression, in a house so close to the next one that once, when a spark ignited the shingles, a neighbor simply jumped from his roof to my father’s and stamped out…
When Point of View exercises get personal
I’ll be leading a workshop on Point of View for the Knoxville Writers Guild (more on that here). In years of teaching college fiction classes, I’ve found that Point of View units can have dramatic personal impacts. Once again, art…
Tagged with: Dont' Ask Don't Tell, Knoxville Writers Guild, Point of View exercises, teaching fiction
Posted in Writing
Posted in Writing
His brother’s hands, before and after
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…
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…
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
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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