Category Archives: Uncategorized

In periods of personal crisis and upheaval, my first response is to find a quiet place and think. I’m not sure this is useful, but it is what I do. I map out how I arrived at this point. I ponder my choices and reconsider my worldview, and I wonder if and where I haveContinue reading “Why Be Good”

Those who loved the understated, quiet prose of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus will not be disappointed by her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun. Winner of the 2007 Orange Prize, besting work by such notables as Anne Tyler and Kiran Desai, the novel is full of halves—characters, and a nation—wandering in search ofContinue reading “Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”

I have been watching reruns of Kitchen Nightmares every night for the last couple weeks, and after a while, Ramsay climbed into my head and camped out there, a cussing, hard-driving, belligerent drill sergeant. To whom I am very grateful. So here’s some of the Ramsay wisdom, distilled into caveats helpful to any artist (and eerilyContinue reading “The Ten Commandments of Quality, or How Gordon Ramsay Kicked My Ass into Gear”

The sentence is perhaps the most abused tool in the writer’s arsenal, and the run-on sentence is the most misunderstood of all–the bane of the student writer, the rusty businessman, the ambitious but isolated storyteller. For sentences, a little understanding goes a long way. The first thing to understand, when it comes to run-ons, isContinue reading “The Difficulties of the Run-On Sentence”

Silence. It’s what an actor hears before the curtain goes up, the same emptiness waiting to be filled that I first heard the night I realized I’m a writer—for better or for worse, for richer and for poorer. I had just turned twenty and won a youth scholarship to a writers’ conference on Whidbey Island.Continue reading “Why I Write”