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…

The argument between Amazon and the Big Five book publishers (Hashette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon&Schuster) is like watching parents fight. I just want to go outside and play and pretend that my world is not in turmoil. For those writers who have been in suspended animation for the past few weeks, you might want…

My week in New Orleans was mostly good, even though I walked too much the first day and very little the second. I often ate too much and not from the healthy menu. Of course, in NOLA a fried oyster poor boy and beignets are not only healthy, but also compulsory. I rode the street…

Writer Jim Harrison in Brown Dog has done the highly improbable: he has me cheering for a hard-drinking loose cannon who will “poke” any woman who’ll have him, and plenty will, who prefers cold weather and a frequent dose of isolation, who is known and unknown. So far I don’t know his real name, BD…

Vacation time–packing lists, new shoes to try out before I go, it’s all expensive and exciting. I can hardly contain myself. Say what? I had to go, so I told myself, to The Container Store, more exciting to me than any amusement park. I came away with a purse-sized planner to contain my appointments, a…