Fellow writer, Hema Vasavada, responded to my blog about the rhetoric of war with this op ed piece she wrote for the Moscow Pullman Daily News. I think it is well worth sharing as a part of our on-going exploration of the cause of the nation’s on-going crisis. MOSCOW PULLMAN DAILY NEWS OCTOBER […]
Archive | Writing
Writing in a PC-Locked World
Politically Correct judgments freeze the pen. Whether writing an e-mail, a job resume or a novel, your internal censors pause the pen, aware of the self-appointed judges on either side of the political divide waiting to spot heresy. For a fiction writer, such judgments strike at the core, at imagination. It is […]
To Ursula LeGuin
Ursula LeGuin died yesterday. “One of the literary greats,” says Margaret Attwood. The media today describes her as a colossus, a radical, a trail blazer. Her voice was heard well beyond the science fiction and fantasy genres; in 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, cited for […]
Don’t Miss Indie Author Day!
Inviting you to Saturday, October 8 11AM PDT, 2PM EDT Libraries across the nation will join in a webcast introducing their local indie authors (authors who self-publish or publish through small presses) I will be joining authors from the Skagit Valley on the Mount Vernon Library panel Click here for the link For those of […]
Another Tale for Today
Browsing through my notes, I came across this dialogue exercise I wrote for a class many years ago. It’s not nearly the level of Tony Fuhrman’s poem, but it seems singularly appropriate to the level of social and political scene today. […]
An Ode for Today from Toni Fuhrman
Every time we awake to another mass shooting, we grow a little more numb, a little less alive. What will it take to shake us out of this ever more detached state of being? Toni Fuhrman’s poem, While I Slept, did that for me […]
Interview with Author Toni Fuhrman
Welcome, Toni, You and I met in Ann Arbor in the 70s, so we have a long history as fellow writers. I’d like you to talk about your writing background—when you began to write, where you get your ideas, how you would describe your style of writing, and what authors have inspired you. Also […]
Entering the Atomic Age
In my last blog, I delved into the magic of storytelling–or more specifically, the birth of stories, a subject that came up in my interview with Liz Adair. I promised to share the memoir that came to me in an afternoon, the first story I wrote. The drawings, which i’m embarrased to claim, are […]
The Magic of Storytelling
In my recent interview with author, Liz Adair, I talked about the origin of stories, and I found myself thinking about its magical qualities. Why, when I sat down to write a story for the first time, a childhood experience that later won a essay prize emerged full blown in an afternoon. Where did […]
The Creation of Hawkins Lane
In my recent interview with author, Liz Adair, I said that HAWKINS LANE began with the image I woke with, one morning, of a child in a wooded lane sensing that the trees had taken everything up into their boughs, leaving the lane untouched. Images are not stories, but they raise a […]
Why Read Book Blogs?
I’m sitting here wondering what to write about for my next blog—and the one after—and the one after that. My brain is in neutral, so I bounce about other people’s blogs hoping to spark a response, or a topic. They say you should pretend you’re at a cocktail party, flitting between groups, picking […]
My Mother’s Hands
In a previous blog (“About the Inheritors”), I talked about how the themes of my life emerge as I write, and more specifically, in The Inheritors, the very American experience of moving between cultures and classes. As I wrote about Carla, Alicia’s mother, I suddenly had a vision of my own mother standing at the […]
