Being Civil As a writer, I have to deal with time. Time and time again, I am asked to do things on a very clear schedule. Drafts are due, copyedited manuscripts need to be turned in, covers approved. Sometimes, I think people imagine writers as these slightly drunken creative types…

Every semester — save for those during the pandemic — I ask my students to go out into the world to hear a writer who is working on the type of writing that we’ve been reading and writing in class. …

When I was little, I believed that adults did very certain things depending on their gender, not that I knew what gender meant at the time. Women — my mother — stayed at home and kept it clean. Sometimes, moms went out to work, but work outside the home was…

People who haven’t had coffee shouldn’t make coffee. I relearned this important lesson a couple of mornings ago upon finding my pot of coffee spilled like a slick across the counter, dripping over the edge, pooling in a coffee pool on the floor. What had I been thinking? Oh, yeah…

As a teacher, I’ve had some rough times figuring out when to stop or start teaching various texts. Some clearly and with force reared as offensive or racist or untenable. …

Conflict When my first agent read my first novel manuscript, she called me up and said, “You don’t like conflict, do you?” Excuse me, I thought. I pretty much AM conflict. I am filled with conflict. I am a 24/7 conflict kind of gal, roiling in her own issues, traumatized…

One of my friends recently asked me how to put a poetry collection together. I told her I would think about it and get back to her. This question is very much like the question of how to create chapters because I don’t really know the answer. Already, I have…

As a reader from the get-go, an English major even before I knew I was one, I always had my idea of what William Shakespeare looked like, kind of a dark version of Ben Franklin. Sort of a literary Quaker Oats guy. This solemn, imposing figure is the man on…

When I set about writing my first novel, Her Daughter’s Eyes, I was truly unsure how to craft a chapter. What was a chapter, exactly? I was not an MFA graduate at that point, and I’d never taken a class entitled: Chapters 101. Was a chapter, I asked myself, like…