A blank page and a fast pen, early morning, no goal but to let the ink flow. I think about the nudge I felt last evening when I bit into a piece of dark chocolate, my unique teeth marks clearly sculpted. And that observation connected to my long-standing love of mystery stories. What if I…

Last weekend I wrote about fish hooks. This week I want to write about water. While I was in high school, I lived a short block from a cold, clear lake in Maine. I now live across the street from a small, shallow lake in Colorado. My son and his wife live across the road…

  Yesterday at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop I heard a lively debate on the writing technique called the hook, the concept that the story/poem/essay/memoir has to pull the reader into the text by “setting the hook” in the reader’s attention the way a fisherman sets the hook in a nibbling fish, a quick and forceful move.…

Admit it–do you make lists and then ignore them? I do. Almost every morning as I do my morning pages, things pop into my head and I jot them down: travel plans, to-do things for the day/week/month, shopping lists, calls to make. I think there is an area in my cerebral cortex that specializes in…

Yesterday was the fifth and final day of my summer writing intensive at Front Range Community College in Westminster CO. I had five students, all grownups, all there because they are writers or plan to write. Four of them were recidivists, having taken other courses with me. This one was bittersweet because FRCC is discontinuing…