The Gift of Prompts

I used to find writing prompts annoying. I mean, they didn’t add up to anything. They just sat there in a notebook. Magnificent or pointless, they were words that would never be published or publishable, that would probably never be read again. But lately I’ve been giving prompts in most of my classes. I’m doing [...]

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Getting Ready for the Next Wave: Our Future as Storytellers

I was listening to NPR on the drive home the other night, hearing how we should be preparing for the rise out of this economic downturn. They were advising everyone to keep retraining, keep improving our skills, and to stay attuned to our industry, so that we’ll be “ready for the next wave.” Well, in [...]

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The Freedom to Dream

In Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood, he writes “Childhood is a branch of cartography.” Chabon muses about the long passages of time when, as a child, he was able to roam free, inventing his own reality as much as exploring it, creating an emotional map of the places where things happened. [...]

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The Storyteller’s Fire

As our Writers Circle prepares for its Creative Arts Showcase next week, I can’t help but be fully aware of the challenge of reading aloud, both from a perspective of performance and as a tool for the writer. My classes and groups have almost always worked orally. We sit around our table and learn to [...]

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