The longer I write, the more I’m intrigued by how a word can conceal as much if not far more than it reveals. Yet if regarded with care, any word can serve not as a wall but as a window to what it can’t further express.
One of my favorite books is The Hundred Greatest [...]

During the production of the movie version of The English Patient, the novel’s author, Michael Ondaatje, became friends with the film editor for the project, Walter Murch.  Their relationship eventually blossomed into The Conversations, a book of, well, conversations, Ondaatje and Murch’s back-and-forth about any subject under the sun, filmmaking, art, fiction, science, poetry.  A [...]

In a recent post I wrote about the thought bubbles of our private selves, the stories we generate as we go about our lives, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Those thought bubbles continually rise and fall within us, but what are the geographical perimeters of that “within”?
I remember seeing [...]

When I lived in Lisbon I exchanged a few e-mails with the writer José Luís Peixoto, but somehow we never managed to meet; my loss, particularly since it has taken me a couple of years to read his marvelous novel The Implacable Order of Things, which won the José Saramago Prize in 2001.
The novel is [...]

The anthology Now Write! Nonfiction, edited by Sherry Ellis, has just been published, and because I have an entry in the book I received an advance copy. Paging through it, I was delighted to see that Jenny Boully was among the other writers represented.
I’m a great admirer of Boully’s work, particularly how [...]

As I’ve been rambling about on my book tour for The Moon, Come to Earth, I’ve been interviewed here and there, and it does the mind good to be sharpened by questions coming at you from unexpected angles. After a good conversation, I can find myself mulling over the exchange for days afterward.
After all [...]

Last week I was reading through an early draft of the critical thesis of Mayumi Shimose-Poe, one of my students at the low-res MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and one of her sentences popped off the page:
“There is a tightrope between the poles of “insider” and “outsider,” and as a fiction [...]

I’ve been on the road this past week, the first stretch of a book tour, and while I traveled by subway in New York City up to one of my reading dates, I noticed that one of those narrow posters lining the wall above the windows, which usually advertise language courses or deals on checking [...]

Most people know that all of us (plus trees, lizards, beetles, jellyfish and so on) are made from the byproducts of nuclear fusion in the cores of stars. “We are stardust,” Joni Mitchell, sang, right?
Luke McKinney, writing for The Daily Galaxy about the likelihood of scientists soon locating a “second earth” out [...]

Thank you for reading this first blog posting, and while I couldn’t be more grateful for your visit, or for the technology that helped guide you here, maybe you should consider setting aside that keyboard of yours from time to time.
As Midge Raymond notes on her helpful literary blog The Writer’s Block,
I’d been cranking away [...]