My 10 week advanced non-fiction course in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension begins tomorrow and I’m going to post part of it every week on this blog. I’ve been teaching the course forever so I decided to come up with new subjects/themes for each week to keep the course fresh not only for me…
Tomorrow, Sunday 7/17/16, I’m part of the WriteTeachers Workshop (with Victoria Zackheim and Anne Perry) at Flintridge Bookstore in La Canada. My first workshop is ‘Writing Your Life Into Story’ and I decided to make a post out of my notes for it (below). If any of you haven’t started writing yet, or are stuck,…
I used to be a little la-de-dah with my students about keeping journals. I’d tell them it was a really good idea, an easy way to write something every day, a way of collecting observations and memories, keeping track of their own emotions etc. And yes, all of the above and more, but I’ve now turned…
Let's face it. Sometimes we can't work, we can't get our writing done every day. I'm always saying you have to write regularly, but sometimes life just sweeps over you and the best you can do is to write field reports in your journal. I've had a tsunami of grandchildren for the past ten days.…
Here's an excerpt from the book I'm working on now, Kicking In The Wall: A Year of Writing Exercises for Fiction, Memoir & Personal Essays. If you do the exercises I'd love to hear if they worked for you. * "The journals are a way of finding out where I really am…They are…
In 1974 my friend Cy saw an ad in the San Diego Union travel section that said: "Travel anywhere Greyhound goes for a full month for a flat fee!" He had been trying to figure out a family vacation for that summer of the gas crisis and here it was. So he bought an "Ameripass"…
I’ve kept a journal since what now feels like the beginning of time. I have a cabinet in my office stacked with over a hundred college lined notebooks – (Stuart and Charlotte occasionally stage a break-in to chew on a few pages and distribute pounds of cat fur). In each stage of my life the…
The day after I wrote the last post about finding something to be grateful for in your writing (hey, it was Thanksgiving), the New York Times style section did a piece about gratitude journals entitled “Let Us Give Thanks. In Writing.” The reporter, Henry Fountain, found it a little hard to believe what Oprah and…
