One of the strategies I use during the August Poetry Postcard Fest is to write out favorite poems of about that length by other poets. Despite having read and loved short forms — such as Haiku and Tanka — for many years, I still find it amazing that someone can pack so much into only […]
“Mightn’t it be a good thing if everyone had to draw a map of his own mind — say, once every five years? With the chief towns marked, and the arterial roads he was constructing from one idea to another, and all the lovely and abandoned by-lanes that he never went down, because the farms […]
July has been a whirlwind of birthdays, weddings, and family get-togethers. I have not been very faithful about blog posts. I have been writing every morning, in my journal, and I’ve been going through my entire novel a little bit at a time, thinking-thinking-thinking about its structure and what the characters need most and what […]
When we started the Writing Lab several years ago, one participant shared her dissertation director’s advice, “A page a day is a book a year.” I’ve repeated this many times, and was pleased to find it attributed by Advice to Writers to Richard Rhodes. If you’re afraid you can’t write, the answer is to write. Every sentence […]