When people learn that I’m a nature writer, there’s a natural assumption that what I spend most of my time doing is writing about nature. While it would not be unkind or even inaccurate to characterize my work this way,…
The end of the decade is here! As we move in to the ’20s, we’re looking back on this past year to celebrate some truly great books. End 2019 with a bang (or start 2020 fresh!) with these 19 fiction…
At the top of every slippery slope is a spot that feels like solid, level ground. For me, the top of one such slope came around mid-May of this year. After holding out for over 10 years, I’d gotten a…
The objective of this workshop is to practice architectural criticism through the lens of insight. Where most architectural criticism is evaluatory, leveling judgment on a given project, this form of feedback is not. It assumes that the world is complex…
Personal essays can do many things. They can help us navigate our experiences, our grief, our trauma, or our joy. They can help show others how to navigate these for themselves. And they can unite us—author and reader—in a shared,…
Openings are important in any piece of writing, but they’ve always struck me as particularly important to critical writing. Why? Well, because critical writing bears the burden of always being about something else, often something readers have heard of and…
It was an essay about climate change. At least that is what I wanted the essay to be about. I wrote passionately about finding trash on the trail, the bear hunter who passed us on the road, a meadow in…
As a mother, I know how hard it is to find time to write. In the early years, it was all I could manage to scribble out a short journal entry in a 10-minute burst while someone else held the…
Don’t know what a lyric essay is? Not sure if you’re even intending to write one? Don’t worry! My class, Structuring the Lyric Essay, will explore the lyric essay as a form that can be used to help inspire your…
Writing a title for a flash fiction or nonfiction piece is like dipping your oar into the roaring water while whitewater rafting. That oar stroke had better do some major work. The flash title is the oar that steers your little…
What really exists is not things made but things in the making. —William James How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. —Eduardo Kohn In my upcoming class, Memory Space: Inherited…
In the beginning of my writing career, it was a given that I’d say “Absolutely” or “Yes” to almost anything asked of me—oftentimes watching others reaping the benefits or, even worse, finding out that the heartfelt energy I’d put into…
“To be an immigrant is to always live in some state of exile, even if its shadow seems to have grown faint inside us; you cannot forget your old homes, no matter how comfortingly familiar your new destination becomes, or…
la·cu·na (ləˈk(y)o͞onə): n. (plural lacunae). 1. an unfilled space or interval; a gap. (“the journal has filled a lacuna in Middle Eastern studies”). 2. a missing portion in a book or manuscript. 3. (anatomy) a cavity or depression, especially in bone….
It was my own struggle with the pain from my childhood—followed by my ultimate decision to write my story—that made me understand the life-changing power of personal narrative. I’d tried to write Hippie Boy for more than a decade. But…
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