After I attended the Midwest Writers Workshop this summer, I made a vow to write about it. I had gone to other writing conferences, but this one felt different. Warmer, helpful. Permanent. As a dutiful outreach […]

When I returned home from the grocery store a few weeks ago, in the Boonsboro neighborhood of Lynchburg, I looked up to see that my next-door neighbors’ shutters had been removed from the front façade of their ho […]

Here are the things I’ve always found challenging:

Organization

Instructions (written, spoken and pictorial)

Maps (obviously)

Sciencey things

Paying attention

The good news about these l […]

The woman walking into the lobby wore a brown skirt, white tights, and a pair of clogs. Her name was Shellay—she-lay—and she had a Polish last name that was hard to pronounce. She said she was a librarian and had […]

After training as a journalist and spending years covering stories all over the world, I returned to my family home in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C. and began to listen in a deeper […]

TO: Right Brain
FROM: Me
SUBJECT: Annual Evaluation

Your full Annual Evaluation Report will be sent shortly but I want to go over some of the highlights briefly. First of all, thank you for finally returning […]

Her car was still sprinkled with debris from her recent move to the city. A misshapen yoga mat, tea towels, her boyfriend’s guitar pedals, a bedside lamp; the persisting clutter of merging lives. Wishing she’d tak […]

“Mother?” Plump, magnified, younger lips open and close. “Mother?”

How many years must she hear it? Mother Mother Mother. How many years already? The lips are those of a luminous fish suspended in water w […]

Have you sold a novel for a seven-figure advance? Yes? Then this post is not for you.

Still here? Skedaddle. Go write something. Yes? Okay.

Now that we’re all alone, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is […]

Bobbie Ellen leaned against the wall of the arcade at Minnow Lake Campground and squinted at Nick Baker. The first wave of a thick Oklahoma summer had sent her inside with the rest of the gang, where the dark room […]

“I passed through Bologna once on the way to…” That’s how my favorite Italian city is usually featured in travel narratives. Tourists know its train station, a surprisingly modest building considering how m […]

I recently interviewed my friend, Sue Eisenfeld, about her creative nonfiction writing, and it turns out she’s taught a range of courses and workshops at Johns Hopkins University in creative nonfiction. She’s […]

I’ve kept an idea journal for as long as I can remember. Whenever a word, sentence or story idea strikes my fancy, I jot it down and date the entry.

One day, I thumbed through the pages, noticing dates on e […]

Just like the adage about loving yourself before being able to love another person, I’ve come to understand that in order to write with depth, you first have to learn to write about yourself. I grew up in a […]

Michael fled his village in South Sudan at the age of five. He trekked a thousand miles through war zones to arrive at a series of refugee camps where he lived for a decade. As a child at Kukuma Refugee Camp, […]