I “teach” writing. I put
that in quotes because I can’t really teach it. What I can do is encourage
people, I can point out where your writing needs more detail, or less, and what
the potential of your story might be. I can offer guidelines to what a personal
essay should attempt to do, or what’s required for good fiction, picture books
for kids, poems or memoir. I can try to create an atmosphere where it feels
safe to write and expose your self. I can offer my own difficult and crazed journey
through these genres – but I can’t really tell you how to do it.

I’m thinking about this
today because I’m learning a lot about writing from Mary Karr as I read her
memoir Lit. I’m underlining and writing notes. She inspires me and makes me want to write; she makes
it look easy. On page 229 she writes about the “pissy, indifferent rain you get
in New England autumns versus the open-firehose storms” back home in
Texas.  Car windows “hum down an
inch” and a guy’s hair “has come unpasted, the stiff strands flipping up like a
car hood popped open.” 

I would like to say go buy
this book immediately – you’ll learn so much from it. But maybe you won’t.
Maybe you wouldn’t even like the book or find it as funny and intelligent as I
do. But what you need to do is find your own author who makes it look easy, who
inspires you, who teaches you something about writing that you won’t find in
any class or book about writing. And you need to keep finding these authors, over and over.