Writing Story / Finding Poetry / Freeing Voice

Claiming and Polishing the Power of Our Stories: Intensive critique classes online in fiction and memoir.  (10 weeks) Begins February 2, 2010! Classes every other week for 10 weeks.
This is an advanced writers’ workshop open both to writers who have studied with me, or those who have not but are invited to participate after sending [...]

2010 Writers and Artists Research Delegation to Cuba! January 3-11, 2010.
A group of writers, visual artists, educators and others will be going to Cuba January 3-11. We will stay in Old Havana, as well as visit nearby Matanzas province and Varadero Beach. We will meet with Cuban writers, artists, filmmakers, architects and others, and individual [...]

April 30, 2009
 
Let’s face it. An economy in shock is not such a shock if you are not only a writer, but a writer from and remaining in the working class.
 
I am not allergic to the thought of making big money with my writing. Not at all. But the real joy would not be [...]

March 19, 2009
(coincidentally, the day before spring)
 
 
Interesting times, no?
 
Hope? Change?
Doom?
 
Restorative justice? Innocence Project?
Families Destroyed. New Kinds of Families Being Created.
 
War Crimes. Truth and Reconciliation.
 
Environmental Destruction. Melting Ice Caps.
Reclaiming the Rainforest. Greening the World.
 
Financial Collapse.
Greening the Economy.
 
Dying Newspapers.
Global News Online.
 
Sometimes it feels like the same old, and getting worse by the moment. Sometimes [...]

March 10, 2009,
Below is an announcement for a reading this Friday in the Minneapolis area, near the astonishing Mississippi River.
I am racing to do too much. Little wheels spinning like a cartoon character. Haven’t posted. Great excuses. The world is the biggest. Visiting my senator (we still only have one in Minnesota), and my representative.
But [...]

December 7, 2008
 
Dear Writers,
 
I have a confession. I am in love with a dead white English guy, a writer. If it isn’t love, at least it is a shock of recognition, a wave of gratitude at being seen, the kind of amazement when someone brings something into words that illuminates, or puts into relief, or [...]

July 30, 2008
Dear Writers, 
I wouldn’t exactly say I am on a roll, like some blog-crazy youngster, but I do feel the need to write more on writing, this big mystery, not as great a mystery as determining the location and nature of evil, or understanding what love actually is, but it is a grand mystery [...]

July 15, 2008
 
The re-entry into writing a blog after so long is a little thorny. Along the road, here is a wonderful quote from Faulkner’s Light in August, in which Mrs. Hines, Joe Xmas’s grandma, muses after his death:
 
“It is because so much happens. Too much happens.”
 
Alfred Kazin mentions this in his essay, “The Past [...]

January 30, 2008 
I am thinking that every act is a creative act.
Only some creative acts provide an opening into something vital; other creative acts provide duplication, follow the path of habit, add to repetition, create walls – solidity – separation from the vital and the as yet unborn. And some acts, of course, create destruction. So, [...]

I wrote the below last week, in a snowstorm. I want to remind you to check the previous post, some good newsy stuff to notice, and to let you know that Grand Web Master Brian Tanaka has pointed to January 11 for the likely release of The Stories of Devil-girl novella-download, so expect more news soon. In the [...]