Musings

Chalida, a student from Thailand dressed in pink everything, insisted: “I CAN’T WRITE! I HATE WRITING!” I asked: “Why do you like pink? Tell your friend in Thai, then translate it into English.” The result: three beautiful paragraphs!

No sports season has been more thrilling than this IU football team’s perfect 16-0 record…  until one brutal hit left its star quarterback lying face down in the grass, his condition unknown.. and all the euphoria popped, like a soap bubble…  revealing the hidden ugly truth of tackle football…

In downtown Oakland, at 4 o’clock in the morning, I go out for an early coffee. No one is around. There is a great stillness… yet, there’s the skunk, the sickening burning smell coming from … a security guard doing his rounds…  lights illuminating ghost-like clouds trailing behind wherever he goes…

Holy Trinity Church stood for almost 70 years as a landmark in the tree-lined, thriving center of Duquesne, a working class suburb, outside Pittsburgh. It became too expensive to repair, didn’t fit Vatican II reforms, and the Duquesne Steel Works closed. The town has lost 80% of its peak population.

In teaching writing, we teachers have taught our students all wrong. We’ve taught them to follow dead formulae rather than follow their hearts, worry about grammatical rules more than say what they honestly think…

Jonathan Maberry gave the Famous Writer keynote speech at the Writers’ Conference. What happened? He shocked the LitCrit Industry with his F… Word! … Yes, I heard him myself …  and it isn’t the word you are thinking of.

After hundreds of airplane flights, I still feel a thrill when I’m stepping into the airplane and look down into that space below my legs, between stairway and fuselage, earth and sky… a space that becomes 35,000 feet deep in the air. 

When I hear about freewriting, it feels like … freedom…! Like a bird in the sky, a leaf in the wind, la ripple on the lake at dawn, the first sign of life, the first heartbeat of a baby in a mother’s womb …