Note: The following article is an excerpt from November 2017 post titled WRITE, DIE, OR GO NUMB, a brief exploration of my literary saints. Today is 3 Octobe...

"To unlock the heart is to know its secrets, or as close as we may come, to hear its soft inner voice, a thing love alone can achieve,

MY FONDNESS FOR MAY borders on idolatry. I admit that. Her touch is a breeze of sunlight. Her laughter, the pelt of a rose. That it is my birthday later in t...

IN SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD II, Richard's uncle, "old John of Gaunt," infirm, close to death, makes an observation on the value of parting words. O, but they sa...

IT WAS AN AGE WHEN PLAYS, poems, and letters were written in longhand. The pen was not just metaphor. Try to imagine a slower, more even rhythm. You were, af...

IN JANUARY, I posted an article called REFLECTING 17: THE BIG EVENT. True to its title, it looked back on the events of 2017, or at least one of them, an eve...

APPLAUSE. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE IT. Even the noblest among us, the most self-assured, modest, and self-deprecating have to admit that. Whether the soft nod o...

SUSAN SARANDON QUOTED HIM more than once in Bull Durham, a film about the great American pastime. He is mentioned with Thomas Wolfe in Sophie's Choice, by bo...

A FEW DAYS AGO, I received an email from a young writer, who, after reading my last post, BLOG TO BOOK: A REPRISE, asked me three questions. First, she asked...

WHEN I FIRST PRINTED IT OUT it was close to seven inches deep, a mountain of excess and overreach that would eventually become my first published book. In sp...

WRITES. It is a word that implies, first, an action. He writes. She writes. And so on. If we noun our verb, as Shakespeare was known to do on occasion, with ...

THERE ARE REASONS WHY YOU WRITE. Desire. Compulsion. Necessity. The desperate must, as in I must write-die-or-go-numb. All of the above? It begins with a lov...

I CONSIDERED DRAFTING a post on alliteration, but rethought that strategy. Why draw attention to a device I choose most often to avoid? Or to take a few shot...

IN ACT 3 of HAMLET, the play, Hamlet the prince offers instruction to a troupe of actors. To paraphrase: Pay attention to words. Don't say too much. Let the w...

WITHOUT RELEVANCE, history is little more than entertainment, a benign curiosity. History can be shy about giving up its secrets. It demands patience. Like a...

BREVITY is the soul of wit. He might have said, "tedium obscures the point." It does. It will. It is a thing we learned from Tyndale—the small peculiar art o...

IF WRITING IS ANYTHING, IT IS A PERFORMANCE. The writer is the lone figure on the stage. A world may watch, judge, applaud, hiss, throw things, or speak his ...

AS A PUBLISHED AUTHOR, I have been reluctant to say too much about the craft of writing in spite of its current popularity and in spite of my devotion to the...

The infinite is liberated through the finite, that is, through the absolute completeness of a line.

THIS TYPE OF FASCINATION IS OLD IN US. It is the newborn to his mother's voice. His eyes aren't his eyes just yet. But his ears are sufficiently tuned. They ...