Browsing the archives for the writing tag
Lately I’ve been choosing a monthly theme for my writing classes. December was “home.” January has been “using fictional techniques to improve your memoir or creative nonfiction.” I asked my faithful, week-in, week-out students last week if there was anything in particular that they wanted to work on in February. They said, the basics of [...]
“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.”–Picasso Resetting my morning alarm to find another half-hour of both.
I’ve had a bad case of holiday blues this month, and two remedies: baking cookies and reading Christopher Hitchens. Nigella Lawson has been my guide to the former; Andrew Sullivan to the latter. It’s easy enough to explain the cookies–butter, flour, sugar, and I are old friends. My near-obsession with Hitchens since his death is a [...]
“I’m in my room next door, and I’ve got everything I shot at my disposal, and you make your collage. That doesn’t take very long. But the first time you take it in here and show it, that’s like taking a cold shower. That’s when you realize that all those things that were delightful in themselves, when [...]
If you’re just arriving at these Lynne Barrett interviews, you’ll want to catch up on Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. If you want to meet Lynne, she will be reading from and discussing Magpies at the Miami Book Fair as part of a panel with Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow), Ana Menendez (Adios, Happy Homeland) and Justin Torres [...]
If you missed Part One of my interview with Lynne Barrett, you can find it here. If you want to meet Lynne, she will be reading from and discussing Magpies at the Miami Book Fair as part of a panel with Tayari Jones (Silver Sparrow), Ana Menendez (Adios, Happy Homeland) and Justin Torres (We The Animals) on Sunday, Nov. [...]
As my MFA thesis director, Lynne Barrett alternately pushed and pulled me through the writing of my memoir-still-in-progress, and for that I will be forever grateful. In addition to being one of the best editors and teachers I’ve ever known (and I’ve known a few), Lynne is also a brilliant writer, and her new short story collection, Magpies, [...]
I’ve told the story here before about how my maternal grandmother, Anne Jones, cleared off her dining room table and then covered it again with a Vogue pattern and beautiful fabric, pinning and cutting and finally taking the whole thing into to a closet-turned-sewing-room to transform it into a dress. And during this process, often [...]
I’ve been thinking about Mark Rothko, sort of. Daphne Gray-Grant is all about writing fast and fluidly, which is why I like to read her. About a week ago, she wrote about seeing the play Red, quoting this comment by Rothko to his assistant, Ken: “Most of painting is thinking. Didn’t they teach you that? Ten percent [...]
