July 25, 2019
Writer Identify Crisis
In an email to my writing friends, I admitted that sometimes I don’t feel like a writer anymore, that I’m slacking off and not doing any actual work. I said […]
July 22, 2019
Thrown to the Weeds
Last Sunday, I picked wild black raspberries in my backyard. The berries were tiny, dark, and prickled with miniscule seeds. Sweet. As I plucked berries from the bush, I thought […]
October 30, 2018
Drafts, Part II: Rewrites, Deleted Scenes & Orphans
In Part 1 of this series, I wrote about my long road of novel revision and some of the reactions I received regarding just how extensive the process has been. […]
October 27, 2018
Drafts, Part I: Revision Resistance
On October 20 I attended Cleveland Drafts, a daylong literary festival that snaked its way through a bookstore, a gallery, and three bars in Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood. The event was […]
October 13, 2018
Where’s Papa going with that axe?
As part of my work at Cleveland Public Library, I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Melissa Sweet, the author and illustrator of Some Writer! The Story of E.B. White. Sweet […]
September 26, 2018
When the First Draft Isn’t the First
In the days before heading off to a writing retreat with some friends, I rushed to complete the first draft a new short story. Once I’d written to the end […]
September 3, 2018
Writing Is Thinking
Years ago, one of my writing acquaintances (we’ll call her B.) was working on her first novel when she received a suggestion from her instructor to be more specific about […]
December 20, 2017
American Sonnets (Part VIII: A Tale of Two Sonnets)
[Continued from “American Sonnets (Part VII: Close-up On Coleman)”] The first published sonnet by Terrance Hayes I can find is in his debut collection Muscular Music, originally published by Tia Chucha […]
July 31, 2017
On Process and Wholeness
In my last post, a quote from Emerson reached me at just the right moment in my own life. In looking into the quote’s context in Emerson’s journals, I found […]
September 14, 2016
The Victor Dog
My husband recently inherited an old Victrola from his maternal grandparents. It’s perfectly maintained; lift the lid and wind the crank and drop the needle on one of the thick records […]
April 21, 2016
Form and “What We Know of Horses”
It was mesmerizing to hear Reginald Dwayne Betts read “What We Know of Horses,” the final poem from his most recent collection, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015), to […]