On Wednesday my Creative Nonfiction students have to turn in a rough draft of their Big, True Story. I went into today’s class determined to make a last-ditch effort to get them to think about narrative arc. Not that it’s the only way, or the best way, but I like to look at stories through […]
“True artists are possessed… they are messianic egomaniacs. They believe that what they do is unspeakably important; it is only that conviction that makes the writer himself important…So Beethoven does draft after draft of his works, scrutinizing, altering, improvising them long after anyone commonly sane would have stopped, delighted… Only the absolute conviction that with […]
I had a really interesting experience the other day in class, and I’ve been debating with myself as to whether or not to share it here. Given our current national debate about guns and violence, it feels like one of those hot topics that I tend to veer away from. You know how it is, […]
I thought I’d circle back to telling you about how I got my doctoral dissertation written. When Annie and Pearl were really tiny, four or five months old, we took them to Spokane to visit their grandmother. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my husband’s brother’s house. My sister-in-law was at that time a Dean at […]