The Writing Life

  It is so important to make time for the art of wandering. To look up: To look down: To look at the wide-eyed world straight on and marvel…

  The other side of my writing life is my editing life. I serve on the Advisory Board for Memoir <(and) journal and am founding Associate Editor of TRACHODON literary magazine, as [...]

There’s the humble chair in the afternoon sunlight… And the big booty chair in The Great Room.   The understated chair in the entrance hallway… And the squatter’s [...]

  A quick news flash for local readers: This Sunday, October 24th at 2pm, I will be giving a presentation and book signing at Weymouth Center on my book, Lost Crossings. Come learn about [...]

  Questions I have asked other writers—decades my senior—this week at Weymouth: “What does the compulsion to write a novel feel like?” “Am I going to love this life so much that I’ll become [...]

And so the Boyd house mansion fills with the sound of women’s laughter, fast fingers at the keyboards, and the nighttime footsteps not of ghosts but of fleshy creative spirits—the human kind, the [...]

  I suppose it’s only fair to say that, for a brief moment after printing my fiction manuscript, I looked around the room and thought to myself: Now what? The silence lasted a millisecond [...]

  I’m not sure what felt more poignant: the thirty-two consecutive minutes during which I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling while listening to the printer spew out my fiction [...]

  Ghost update: There’s been another sighting in the Thomas Wolfe room! More soon! In the meantime… Author James Boyd believed that the role of the artist in society included “the [...]

  I’ve tried lights on, doors locked and lights on, doors unlocked. Then lights off, doors, locked and the next night—lights off, doors unlocked. I’ve tried night songs and day songs; even a [...]