The Writing Life

I first started teaching about the “creative imagination” and the “technical imagination” after reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook. In short, Vandermeer explains, the creative imagination is [...]

  With Airstream Dispatches kicking off last Sunday for our first webinar, I thought I’d share a few of the guest posts I’ve written from around the web. All of these have a [...]

Two weeks ago, as calendars flipped from August to September and many of us (in this hemisphere, at any rate) readied for fall clothes and back to school schedules, I took a two-night retreat [...]

  Originally published in War, Literature & the Arts. “I remember walking the flag-lined streets of that tiny town in the Berkshire Mountains. I remember the empty grocery store [...]

Summertime is music time–always and forever–in my mind, and that has a lot to do with growing up in the Pacific Northwest during the Grunge and Gorge Amphitheater era, attending more [...]

Maybe it had more to do with being alone, with being completely immersed in a world I discovered between the pages of a book. Or maybe it was the fact that, at the end of whatever book I held in [...]

I’ve been conducting informal research amongst Maximum Impact’s private students, writers I meet at Interlochen Center for the Arts, and fellow creatives whose work I admire. More than anything [...]

Toe River Arts Council promotes the arts in North Carolina’s Mitchell and Yancey counties and recently they visited my writing studio. “When you’re a writer and you’re in [...]

On May 15th and 16th I’m leading a conversation on the Right to Write with the International Women’s Writing Guild. In preparation, I wrote a guest post sharing my experience [...]

Why do my stories matter? When the icebergs are melting. When mass shootings are the new norm. When corruption has infiltrated our leadership. What possible good could come of sitting still, [...]