For a couple of years now I’ve been studyin’ about death. I’m getting older; my parents are getting older, and I don’t have a lot of…

In a previous life, my job was to help people get normal with food — not so much the planning and preparing of it, but how to make peace with it. How to coexist with it. …

In a previous article, I wrote about how to bag yourself a Writing BFF: Bagging Your Writing BFF — Tips ‘n Tricks I met my writing BFF in a night class, one that promised to help us finish our novels. There were a dozen or so others…medium.com However, I didn’t mean to make it sound as though the relationship I have with my writing buddy was easily achieved, or that it’s always been smooth sailing between us. As with any friendship in its…

I met my writing BFF in a night class, one that promised to help us finish our novels. There were a dozen or so others in the class, all with manuscripts in various stages of completion. …

I’m saying goodbye to a beloved pair of walking boots the same week I’m reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. (Sorry for the SPOILER but I’m probably the last person in America to read this book, anyway): As Strayed crafts a pair of boots out of duct tape to survive the Pacific…

This is a little story about writing wild but staying within the lines: I’m disciplined about writing, but this is a practice I’ve had to cultivate. Not because I won’t show up to the page every day — oh, no. I will sit down and open a notebook at the same time every day, day after day like the best little automaton you…

I used to teach for the Transition Assistance Program, a four-day course that helps active duty military people move smoothly to civilian life — job search, budgeting, how to decide what to wear, day after freaking day when you don’t have a uniform anymore — all sorts of useful stuff. …

Twenty years ago, I took my first online writing class. In the early weeks, students posted short stories and critiqued them as a getting-to-know-you exercise. My friend Renee was living in Boston but had grown up in Minnesota, and the other students gushed at how her prose shimmered like wheat fields in the summer sun. I was living in Turkey…

Here’s a story I heard in elementary school that has stuck with me, that I often think about when I’m writing: A kid goes to an old man, known in those parts to be wise, for advice. “The other kids pick on me,” he says. “How do I get big muscles so I can be more intimidating?” The old man, who’d been napping in the shade of a tree when the…