-
Blankness or Clutter, How Do YOU Begin a Writing Project?
I have always felt sympathy for my freshman composition students as they anticipate a writing assignment in my class. I know the discomfort of facing a blank screen. I understand the anxiety some students experience when trying to fill the blankness with . . . something . . . something that will satisfy the requirements Read more
-
How Much Should We Really Think about Audience?
Lately I’ve been writing about food. I’ve been reflecting on the complicated relationship I’ve had over the years with eating. The way I overate during the summer after my father died when I was twelve, downing box after box of Keebler cookies all those hot afternoons, enough to singlehandedly keep those tree-dwelling elves in business. Read more
-
Writing about Family Secrets: God, Father, Power
My career-long exploration of contemporary memoirs has led me to examine stories in which writers choose to reveal family secrets—those skeletons that families try to keep locked in their closets, those uncomfortable truths that they choose not to share with others. Two memoirs stand out for me as good examples of instances in which a Read more
-
Moment on a Bridge in Western Maryland (An Experiment in Memoir)
A police officer stood in the road ahead signaling for me to stop. I had just left the campus of the community college where I taught and had driven less than half a mile when I saw him standing under the freeway overpass. He seemed to be stopping traffic for no reason. No one else Read more
-
How to Leave Your Problems on the Page
Do our problems define us? Have our past experiences, especially those that were difficult or troubling, made us who we are? Are they an integral part of our identity? In their 1990 book Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, family therapists Michael White and David Epston observed that people sometimes define themselves in terms of their Read more
-
The Sign (An Experiment in Memoir)
One year a few weeks before Easter, we in the hills of Western Maryland received a sign. As the new light of a spring morning appeared over the mountains, a man trudged down Baltimore Street in Cumberland dragging an eight-foot log cross. He shouldered the cross beam and leaned forward at an acute angle, pushing Read more
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
Recent Posts
Person on the Page 