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Incidentally, the cast works in my favor with the 5th, 6th, and 7th graders at this McDowell County elementary school. They’re quite impressed with the bright blue pump and the fact that I broke [...]

This fall, I spent 6 weeks in Alaska. During that time I clocked about 100 trail miles (walks, jogs, hikes, backpacking), 100 bike miles, and almost 1,000 miles by car. Less than 24 hours before [...]

It’s a whirlwind of a day teaching four 90-minute long sessions to 5th, 6th, and 7th graders in McDowell County. All totaled, I see about 100 students. We talk about similes and the five senses, [...]

[Weymouth board member Elaine Sills and I after tonight’s live music performance in The Great Room of Boyd Mansion. The performers? Esteemed Fred Moyer (pianist) and Nancy Green (celloist), [...]

  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 [...]

I don’t often like to reflect the negatives in life. If a situation is challenging, I’ll take some personal time after I get through it to consider how I might grow from that challenge. But by [...]

  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 [...]

  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 [...]