I’ve been thinking, for various reasons, about this phrase, “Best Practices,” which I was introduced to a long time ago, in graduate school and when I was teaching as an adjunct. The idea as I understood it then was that in a situation that is stubbornly imperfect — an intractable situation, or one in which […]
I recently came across a small book titled One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way. The author, Robert Maurer, didn’t really tell me anything new, but he did reinforce beautifully what I already knew. And in an extremely simple way. As it is a small book, One Small Step was also pretty easy to just […]
This Saturday I’m teaching a class — Writing the Creative Chakras — with my friend Margaret Riordan, and I think I’m having a panic attack. When I was a new teacher, I had a mentor who told me, “Teaching is easy: you go in the first day of class and teach your students every thing […]
Any excuse to share a Ted Kooser poem. Last September, at Litfuse, I took a workshop with poet Samuel Green about working with images. He shared poems that were numbered haiku-like stanzas all dealing with a single abstraction (love, for instance). Similes and metaphors scattered over the pages and swayed through the air as we […]