“You don’t have to rely on reason.”

September 30, 2021

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said that logical arguments are always less effective than moving stories. So, if you want to persuade someone to do something, appeal to their heart, not to their brain.  I thought of this when reading this book. Brewer argues that if … Read More

“I said O let us not go.”

September 24, 2021

My love of reading the stories people tell about their lives led me to this book about the great migration to Oregon and California between 1840 and 1870 as told by women who kept diaries. We see passages like this one, by Abby E. Fulkerath, “Agreeable to … Read More

“It’s the kind of room that makes me hate the world.”

September 20, 2021

What an experiment — a novel with no plot, about a woman whose name we don’t know, set in an unidentified location. It’s a collection of descriptions of how the protagonist responds to her surroundings. NPR compared the book to “slow cooking” that requires patience. The … Read More

“But then Shakespeare had a thought: What if a character had a conversation – with himself.”

August 30, 2021

Before Shakespeare invented the soliloquy, actors spoke in monologues and dialogues.  Soliloquys are a radical combination of the uninterrupted speech of one person (in monologues) with the tension created by expressing two different perspectives (in dialogues). Soliloquys demonstrate how a character can go back and forth when … Read More

“I began to think that some of us are the designated rememberers.”

August 20, 2021

I always begin my “How to Write Your Memoirs” classes by asking, “Why do you want to do this?”  No one has ever  answered the question like novelist Pat Conroy does in this collection of essays about writing memoirs.  Conroy said that he was surprised that when … Read More

“She felt that surely she hadn’t done every single thing wrong.”

August 13, 2021

Of course, this character – Astrid – had not done every single thing wrong. But, after watching someone she had known for 40 years get hit by a bus (literally), she suddenly faced the fact that she had made plenty of mistakes and had done things she … Read More

“Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”

July 30, 2021

What makes this book a bestseller? Clearly, the sad “if only I had…..” theme of the book resonates with many people during a year when mental health issues are skyrocketing.  Perhaps more importantly, the novel is written by someone who has lived the experience he is … Read More

“I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened.”

July 22, 2021

I nearly fell off my chair when I read this statement in Stephen King’s book On Writing. It provides such a sharp contrast to the 20 other books I’ve been reading on the subject of writing memoirs. Because I’m working on my own book on this … Read More

“Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.”

July 8, 2021

We’re in the middle of the summer, and I’m still in the process of “righting the ship.”  After feeling off-balance for a year, I am turning once again to my wise friend, Parker Palmer. This is the book that I chose for my first blog post … Read More

“Black children continue to be unconsciously trained to correlate blackness with wrongness and whiteness with rightness.”

June 25, 2021

Let’s start with this idea: linguists do not designate any language as being superior.  And yet, when I teach my students to write academic essays in “standard” English, I am in fact telling them what language I believe is superior.  Baker-Bell argues that “standard” English is a … Read More

“Resistance is not about laziness, lack of will power, or the failure of intellect and imagination.”

June 18, 2021

Instead, it’s about neurology and psychology, Rosanne Bane argues in her book about the resistance that nearly all writers experience at some point. She explains what happens in our brains when we have trouble writing. As a writing teacher, I have been experimenting with ways to support … Read More

“It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could move to take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow.”

June 2, 2021

Were my reading assignments interesting?  Moving?  Inspiring?  These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes.  I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here.  She writes about spending an afternoon in the library reading Yeats and feeling so … Read More

“. . . and I doze here, dreaming that something lies under a suburban lawn, waiting to change my life . . .”

May 19, 2021

Henry Taylor’s poem “The Muse Once More” continues: “…to draw me away from what I chose too long ago to forsake it now on some journey out of legend, to smuggle across the world’s best-guarded borders this token, whatever it is, that says I have risked my … Read More

“It occurred to me how curious it was that books are so often written about as if they were toasters.”

May 11, 2021

Toasters? In Anne Fadiman’s world, there is a difference between useful objects such as toasters and important things that you want to maintain a connection with, such as books. She loves books. As a writer, and the daughter of parents who were both writers, and … Read More

“No way those girls could have turned out halfway normal.”

May 3, 2021

“Those girls” are the Vignes twins, who at a very young age, saw five white men lynching their black father. The neighbors predicted that the girls couldn’t be “right” afterwards, and indeed, both girls went on to make many questionable choices. This novel — a bestseller — … Read More