Hello, everyone. This will be a short post, but I have been thinking about this thing that happened since it happened, and so I want to share it with you. Some of you may know that I teach creative writing…
…Actually, I think everyone should read Moby-Dick. That doesn’t mean I admire the thing, it just means I’m finding it intriguing. This is my second attempt at reading it; I last tried in 2015 and made it all the way…
Hello from Dubai, where I’m on a long layover on my way home from my 13th deployment for ShelterBox. I want to take some time to tell you a little bit about something I don’t think a lot of folks…
In my home country of Taiwan (and probably in many other cultures), your elders are not to be questioned. Whatever they say goes. There is no discourse, no discussion, and you are most definitely in for a world of hurt,…
When I was 18 or so, I went to Oregon to be a camp counselor. All the counselors had camp names–Seaweed, Alpine, Whinny, Weed, Shaggy, Scribbles, Moondog, Kramer. One of the ones I admired the most was about my age,…
If you’re anything like me, you like shiny things. I don’t mean shiny things like diamonds and pearls and watermelon tourmaline, but I mean shiny things like all that distracts from the work you do to make a living or…
When Mr. Gooddirt and I went to our first-ever yoga class in Chicago in the mid-2000s, we only knew a little bit of what to expect. We hoped it would change us from being tight-hamstringed runners and cyclists into better…
I met some people over the two days and a night we were in Morro Bay. Well. That’s not entirely true. I met one person. Watched another from afar. And found an item that helped me to write the first…
Over Twitter a little while ago, the author Sequoia Nagamatsu posted this: I don’t have the same feelings Mr. Nagamatsu has about literary Twitter–I think I probably read Twitter with full knowledge that the medium is totally curated–but I think…
This is Part 16 of a multiple-part live-blog of Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer. Parts 1-15 can be found here. Writer and editor Jane Friedman believes writing can be a career, and her latest book, The Business of Being a…
