Why did the joke not cross the road? Because only the people on this side got it. When I first started writing, back in the 1980s, I was mostly re-examining some disturbing times from my own life by recreating them as fictions. I’d give my fictitious characters my troubles and see if they handled them […]
On Humor and Parochialism by Richard Chiappone Read More »
In this month of Independence Day, it is relevant to consider our intellectual freedom. It is the “rights of library users to read, seek information, and speak freely as guaranteed by the First Amendment,” according to the American Library Association. If intellectual freedom is too much of a mouthful, you can just say the right
Intellectual Freedom and Writers by Lynn Lovegreen Read More »
When my first creative book, a travelogue called Searching for Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez was published a million years ago, I was already working on the first chapters of the next book—not because I knew it’s good to be in the middle of one new thing to distract yourself from the sales and review outcomes of the
This February it was dark and sprinkling rain and I was walking up a steep hill in Wallingford from the Burke-Gilman Trail pushing the silver Gary Fisher mountain bike that my sister-in-law bought in 1994. In fact, she and I bought the same bike, the same week, back when she was my brother’s girlfriend, now
Still Calling Me Daughter: an essay in my late 40s by Jessica Cherry Read More »
“Decades after the events of November 1973, I still struggled with understanding, accepting, moving on… Although I was seventeen when my father hired Jones to pour acid on Mom and my stepfather Dale, I know that by then a lot of damage had been done… Scenes gradually started to grow in my head-vignettes of smells
Spot Light on New Books: I Love You More, a Reluctant Memoir by Joan Burleson Read More »
This spring I was honored to be chosen by the Friends of the Homer Public Library as the recipient of the 2024 Lifelong Learner Award. This was truly a great honor in a community full of impressively smart, thoughtful, and passionate learners who generously share their knowledge, wisdom, and crafts with others. What follows is
What I’ve Learned About Learning and the Fight to Control It by Nancy Lord Read More »
“Writing about your own life should feel a bit like taking your clothes off in front of strangers or saying things you would normally only tell a close friend.” This insightful advice was given to me by an author who kindly read my early draft for my nonfiction book, a collection of short stories about
Who Feels Comfortable? by Anette Coggins Read More »
“Look at the boaters down there.” As a nonfiction writer with a passion for history and adventure, I sometimes tap webs that link individuals over centuries, millennia even, and thousands of miles apart, individuals otherwise not connected. For the cover of my new collection of Grand Canyon essays No Walk in the Park, I sought
Alignments by Michael Engelhard Read More »
Don’t feel like writing today? Nor doing much of anything. Yet you know writing (something, [anything!]) is precisely the thing to do to get going. Go Birding! Fresh air, exercise – proven mood improvers. But passing time searching a marshland for ordinarily magnificent avian species… Or letting them find you. This writing-enabling potion might be
Birding and Wording by Sean Ulman Read More »
Next week, my first suspense novel, The Deepest Lake, will be published. It’s my sixth novel and a big departure from my previous genres of historical fiction and literary fiction. I don’t plan to write only suspense novels from this point, but I’m acutely aware that plunging into this genre has taught me lessons I’ll
