Author at Large
So the writing life. Work a full time job and a single dad to a teen and a tween girls. That’s an education. A guy learns more about girl problems from them than in all the former wives combined. No joke. A dad also learns the long game. I mean it’s easy to get caught …
Observation, it has been observed, is a key element in being a writer (just think any artist when I say writer). Indeed some say to live a fulfilling and joyful life a person must be able to live in the moment. It’s hard to escape the moment when you are savoring it no matter what …
I’ve always wanted to be writer. Or more precisely, a storyteller. When my first daughter was born I was in my mid-thirties. I worked as a firefighter/forestry worker still going through the motions of writing stories and poems and getting some published, but realized how inadequate it was. I had bought into the notion that …
My greatest misconception about being a writer when I was growing up was that writers needed to go out and have experiences. I was captivated by Joseph Conrad having been a sailor, Melville having been a whaler, Twain a miner and riverboat pilot, plus Hemingway, and London to name a few. I went out to …
Recently I had a poem in The Cascadia Review. At the bottom is a statement of place. I’ve rambled about place before in relation to writing, but in this case it wasn’t how it affects or informs the story or poem, but how a writer looks at the land before creating. I hope you enjoy …
My daughters have spring break the last week in March. A twelve and ten year old, they have big plans for me when I arrive. It is a 15 hour drive from Mordor where I live to Boise, Idaho where my daughters live. It is a trip I look forward to even though I leave …
Me and Sten the notepad cruised to a local coffee shop and ended up in a bar downtown. That’s how we roll it seems. I anchored down a stool. Dark and long, the doors to the alley and street propped open letting a bitter wind blow through like lost hipsters, it felt the right place …
Here is the title essay from my essay collection, Fever and Guts: A Symphony as it appeared in the wonderful Dos Passos Review. For the book I broke the essay into its four movements and spaced them throughout the book. Section I begins the book and IV ends as one would expect in doing this. …
Daniel Orozco told the class that writing a story was like building a wall and all the words were bricks and you don’t build a wall all at once. It takes shape one brick at a time. Another construction metaphor was used in revision. Kim Barnes talked of remodeling the kitchen when thinking of reworking …
In a crowded auditorium in Walla Walla, Washington’s Whitman College, a student raised his hand and asked Tim O’Brien why he wrote fiction about his war experiences. O’Brien said, “To tell truths that I can’t tell in nonfiction.” Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Pam Houston, Flannery O’Conner