Writing Home

This post mostly serves as a buffer between my last post in July, about my friend Joan Preiss, and what was was written as my next post m...

Despite my earlier disdain for Twitter , I have begun to tweet a few times a week. It has helped ease my withdrawal from Facebook. And, unli...

I vowed on my Facebook page (where else?) four days ago that I was taking a break from Facebook. But I have found it difficult to entirely a...

When my son was a toddler, he didn't want to sleep in his own room. While the family bed concept might work for some people, I needed my...

Illustration of the voyage of the Pequod, from Moby Dick, one of a series of 12 literary maps produced as a calendar by the Harris-Seybold...

One of my goals this summer was to read Alice Munro's Selected Stories in sequential order, to get a better feel for her evolution as ...

Hurricane Irene passed through this weekend, hurling branches against our house all night into early morning. Acorns rolled madly across the...

Earlier this summer I visited my hometown of Moravian Falls, N.C., and discovered it has become a point of pilgrimage—some newcomer ministe...

I was excited recently to discover that Yahoo still maintains a Web subject directory (which, ironically, I found via a Google search); even...

In a post last February, "On getting free HBO for a month," I described the HBO program "Real Sex" and made the startlin...

So, I became a reporter for a daily newspaper in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, before there were cell phones, digital cameras, high-spee...

Lucky is the person who can write a short story while listening to the Rolling Stones or a Bach fugue. Or who, like my spouse, can write at ...

I was so busy with (paid) editing work last week that I worked through Saturday and Sunday, into the evening. Yet, I still found the time to...

I got this strange email today: This is Shiela from hp-ink-cartridges.org. We stumbled on your blog while searching for Hp Ink Cartridges...

The Washington Post Style section ran an article yesterday about author Kelly Corrigan who, despite having two books in print, had to cobbl...

After I published my Popularity post (in which I lamented that stupid videos on YouTube can claim a million viewers in a matter of days whi...

At a PTA meeting I went to a couple of nights ago, some parents argued that, for ecological reasons, the PTA newsletter should no longer be ...

[This is the second in what may be an ongoing series on Facebook for writers ]. "It's complicated." When someone's relatio...

Do you ever sneak onto Facebook, guilty that the tiny amount of time you linger there might have been better spent composing haikus or writi...

“Had-i-lay, did-i-lay, had-i-lay, pood-i-lay.” These words don’t seem significant, yet nearly five million people have tuned in on youtube t...