Came upon a few posts from my old blog 50 shimmering pages that I thought might be of interest to some of you. March 14, 2013 For the last several months, I have been obsessed with trying to understand what makes one novel more broadly appealing than another. Because the question is complex and thorny,…
“You become a better writer because you need to become a writer. Nothing else.” ~ Grace Paley
High school students in China understand the burden of expectation. As this article points out, 9.4 million of them compete for the most coveted prize in China — a spot in one of the nation’s top universities. So great is their burden that the entire country takes extreme measures to allow students to perform their…
For the past several days, I’ve been working through a stack of critical analysis essays and printed slides of accompanying oral presentations as well as revisions of short stories and personal essays. Every semester I struggle to come up with rubrics that will help guide students toward successfully completing assignments in my creative writing courses. It’s not…
So my first semester as the writer-in-residence at Salem College has just ended, and now that I have a better sense of my responsibilities, I thought I’d share with you just what I’ve been doing. In case you were wondering. As you may know, there are different kinds of residencies offered to writers. I’ve been…