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Ahoy, dear blog readers! Friday, July 29th 2011 is the 6th BLOGIVERSARY of The Writing Life! That’s six years of 5-7 posts per week that have carried this writer through temporary [...]

As an Oregonian, I came surprisingly late to the Portland, OR indie folk rock band The Decemberists. ‘Round about the time they formed 11 years ago, I left the west coast for what I thought was a [...]

One of my favorite activities to do with students of any age is creating memory maps for an engaging nonfiction prompt about place-based writing. Working with teens, this prompt is doubly [...]

You wake up and already you are behind. There are 60 pages to proof for the magazine (due yesterday). There’s the 25-page portfolio critique for one of your clients. There’s 60 more pages on the [...]

I’m back at it, folks, only this time with my fellow Interlochen Summer Arts Faculty. A little Paul Desmond in the background, a few “discard” books, some pens and glue and [...]

Friday, July 22nd Public Reading Katey Schultz (reading from Flashes of War) and Jess Foster (playwright) 7:00 pm @ The Writing House on the Interlochen Campus The evening will begin with short [...]

I’m revising a short story. Which means I’m eating. A lot. Cutting scenes and adding scenes and scratching out characters whole cloth requires Jelly Bellies or hot cocoa (with rice milk) or [...]

Round Three of my self-imposed Boot Camp is slightly less ambitious than Round One and Round Two, but I hosted 2 friends for 3 days and also managed to contract a snot-infused, [...]

I’ve been putting this post off for a long time, though the hatch marks sizzled into my brain over the past eight months with a permanence that still smarts. Nineteen months into my two-year [...]

It’s easier just to listen at home, you might think about guitarist Leo Kottke. Or about any single-artist/single-instrument show. Why bother? A self-described depressive, Kottke himself might [...]