At Home in the World: A Summer Writing Class 2017
Thich Nhat Hanh is regarded by many as one of the most skillful and pragmatic of spiritual teachers. In 2016 he published At Home in the World, a succinct autobiography of his ninety years of…
Category: Writing
Thanks, Jack
I first read this in August 2005, a seed Dear Layla came out in 2015, fruit That is why I want to use short chapters, each with verselike heading, and very many such chapters; slowly,…
Reading Leads to Writing
1. Yesterday I was rereading Chilean poet Nicanor Parra’s After-Dinner Declarations, which I first read in 2013, and came across this page with my scribbles: 2. In Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine, these scribbles became…
The Good News of Publishing a Novel, 4.19.2017
At Amazon.com, I see that my friend Jason Makansi’s novel, The Moment Before, will be out in November. It’s about “a woman and her beloved Syrian father, separated forty years earlier when he is swept…
The Good News of the Barakats, 4.6.2017
Last night, Sharifa Barakat and I had dinner at Central Cafe (along with Imman Musa and Dania Saffaf Atienza). Sarah Dwidar introduced me to Sharifa her freshman year at SLU on sunny day on West…
The Good News, 3.8.2017
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …
The Good News, 3.5.2017
The Good News is … Natalie Long has a working title for a memoir to come— Wander, Work, Eat, Agitate Natalie discussing how a Community Bill of Rights challenges an unjust legal structure that elevates…
The Good News, 3.3.2017
The Good News is … In 2016 Lindsey Trout Hughes took three on-line writing classes with me, and—to her surprise and my delight— embraced her poetic vocation. She has graced me with epic emails, and scintillating…
A More Lively Mode
I read James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson in the summer of 1999. At the time I was gathering materials for what eventually became The Book of Mev. The following passage from Boswell left its…
Take the Long View
I once wrote for a magazine: I made a calculation, that if I should write but a page a day, at the same rate, I should, in ten years, write nine volumes in folio, of…