Category: Essays

Dedication
Five Points

A for no-particular-reason decision: To take a lunch break.

French Accent Marks: A Beginner Offers a Primer
Frenchly

For me, an American with a unique lack of talent for learning languages, the five French accent marks (also referred to as the diacritics) can be confusing.

Writing in a Time of Disaster
The Writer’s Chronicle

Trouble, as we all know, forces a reordering of priorities, in a rather unhappy way. So long, petty concerns!

Frozen
Decor Maine

I fell into writing about homes a decade ago. Not because of any special knowledge, but because a Maine shelter magazine took a flyer on me.

46: A Journal
Narrative Magazine

Here’s what I forgot this week: The name of one of my favorite students, the name of that Carol Shields book I love, the name of that Willa Cather novel I love, the details of a story I read, just two days after I read it. This last failure was a real problem; I forgot the details while I was meeting with the student-author to discuss the story.

Last Things
Narrative Magazine

My sister and I step briskly out of the greengrocer to get away from the men in line behind us who have told us, in great detail, what they’d like to do to us, where they intend to put certain parts of their bodies.

My Son’s Internet Rendezvous
Salon

I took my 13-year-old boy across the country to meet a girl he knew from “Minecraft”—and it was totally worth it.

That’s Funny
Fiction Writers Review

What’s funny in fiction–and what’s not.

The Dangerous Act of Writing
Agni

Her boyfriend was very intense. I know, because he’d been my boyfriend before he’d been hers. This was at Yale in the early eighties

Jump Already
The Writer’s Chronicle

Having a useful artistic preoccupation is one thing, failing to move forward is another.