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Writing on a keyboard has become a natural gesture of many modern humans. Not a gesture but a motion; not a motion but a manner of being; more like eating or making love, a mode with us; as an apprentice woodworker would, years ago, have carved a dove from a pine knot in the off […]

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

I wrote in a poem once that I am “ruled by ruled paper.” I buy ten-cent notebooks at back-to-school specials and proceed to make lists and notes in them throughout the year. Things like stop by the bank, make brownies, email Sean, scoop cat’s litter box, update google calendar, GRADE, work on chapbook, Casandra’s open

To say it now: I can hear the tangible skin of words — as one might with his tongue taste musicalities or catch with the olfactory glands the boulder-grey whiffs of uncertainty. In eleventh grade, one afternoon, in my high school library, contemplating how O’Hara was telling us that Lana Turner had fallen, I came

How do we as writers best learn successful habits? By emulating the successful? As I prepared for my first return to AWP in six years, I had to brace myself for the inevitable recognition of Survivorship Bias in my own thinking and the confounding nature of writing advice in general. Never mind the fact that

You imagined the chair of the creative writing program spoke the same words as the head of the drama department. “She is terrible, but there is something about her.” You imagined the chair twisted his mustache hair while he looked at some other core faculty on the opposite side of his desk. Then you saw

Comedian Steve Harvey has a routine where he talks about the third eye of comedians. In talking about this third eye, he says that you get your two natural eyes, but you also get a third eye that allows you to “see” the underlying currents in situations — or, to see things that others don’t

My friend Chris invited me to visit her at work. She’s a nurse practitioner at a VA clinic in San Francisco, and she and her colleague Erin had begun a writing group for homeless vets. I’d helped them set up the guidelines for the group, using what I’d picked up from my time as a

The first time I held an infant in my arms I was eleven years old. My mother had offered me over to watch the son of a client while they toured the woman’s home and my mother advised her on preparing the property for sale. She’s wonderful with babies, she told the woman when we

“Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde. One of the hardest parts about being a writer is dealing with the tangled mess of emotions that assaults you when you’re reading something you love: there’s a feeling of sheer joy in the lyricism of words well woven; a renewed awareness of the pure