Jul 2, 20232 minWriting and EditingWishing I Were a Web DesignerI'm cheating on my blog post today because I have spent all weekend (so far) working on my site. A short back story: Before my trip to...
Jun 11, 20233 minTravelTaking Things Bird by Bird I arrived home late last night after nearly two weeks away in Costa Rica and Panama. In Costa Rica, I attended a retreat called "Tame...
May 25, 20233 minWriting and EditingMusic as Writing What is writing, anyway? A way to communicate, sure. But to communicate what? According to Webster's Dictionary, to communicate means...
Feb 19, 20234 minWriting and EditingOn the Importance of Reading and WritingIn Composition 101 at the University of Tennessee, students learn the basic elements of rhetoric and about how it applies to writing they...
Feb 5, 20234 minTravelPeleș CastleI've been thinking about how buildings tell stories. Like novels, buildings tell stories about who we are, what we value, what time...
Jan 29, 20233 minWriting and EditingWhy Are We Here?On the first day of school, after the usual introductions and syllabus review, I ask my students to pull out a sheet of paper and answer...
Jan 15, 20233 minWriting and EditingNarrative Distance in RomaniaI've been thinking about the similarities between writing and photography lately. About how you can zoom in or out towards your...
Nov 6, 20224 minWriting and EditingWriting as a Way to Read LifeLiterature differs from life in that life is amorphously full of detail, and rarely directs us toward it, whereas literature teaches us...
Oct 30, 20223 minWriting and EditingTarget Versus Actual AudienceIn my last post on writing, I discussed the idea that there is no such thing as writing in general. Writing is always "in particular"...