Month: March 2016

“Each night I sat on the porch and wished for some surge of feeling, some firelit stream of sound to lead me away from all that I had known.”

strandCan you love a poem that you don’t understand?  I think this question divides the poetry-reading public into two camps: those who prefer Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, and Ted Kooser on the one side, and those who prefer poets such as Mark Strand on the other. In his 1998 Paris … Read More

“I had had a dream, and that dream was a warning of what might happen to me if I rejected what I’d been and who I was.”

Levine 3Philip Levine’s essay “Entering Poetry,” describes the day he began writing about the people he had worked with in Detroit auto factories.  “When I closed my eyes and looked into the past, I did not see the blazing color of the forges of nightmare or the torn faces of … Read More

“A blog post, a personal essay, even a full-length memoir, is not about stuffing in as much as you can; rather, it’s about illustrating something correctly.”

smithJust because it happened, doesn’t make it interesting, Marion Roach Smith bluntly observes in this short book on writing memoir.  What makes it interesting? Roach Smith’s answer to this question sets her book apart from other textbooks on this topic. She advocates focusing on a universal theme, such … Read More

“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”

Strout2 Lucy BartonIn an interview, novelist Elizabeth Strout said that she sees writing as a way “to help people,” that her job was to try “to open somebody’s eyes just a little bit for one minute.” Is there a greater challenge that writers can give themselves? And how can fiction writers … Read More

“Learning to participate in discussion is a lifelong learning project, and most of us go to our graves feeling we still have a lot to learn.”

brookfield 2However, as authors Brookfield and Preskill note, that “doesn’t mean that we can’t get better at creating the conditions under which good discussion is more likely to occur.” We can increase the odds of being successful by planning carefully, having realistic expectations, and being willing to monitor closely its value … Read More