The week in brief and a teaching story

There’s a great piece on maintaining one’s writing motivation, keeping the numbers up, so to speak, that I highly recommend here.
We returned from AWP at 3 am Monday morning.  I love Amtrak; I really do.  And we  even slept in our seats this time, to save money.  Still love it.  Please, President Obama, open some [...]

AWP Day 3: And So It Goes

I almost always get a lot out of AWP, but honestly, some years are better than others. This was a particularly good year. In spite of a few duds, which are inevitable, the panels I went to had a seriousness about them, the feeling that, unlike in previous years, the partcipants weren’t speaking off the [...]

Live From Chicago–AWP 2009 Day 2

Still no camera (long story) today but tomorrow is looking good.
Day started with an hour in the athletic club on the stationary bike, which had its own tv from which I could watch footage of the plane crash in Buffalo. Sigh. Then breakfast at Corner Bakery four blocks away and the ritual stop [...]

Live from Chicago: It’s AWP 2009

Day One Seen and Heard (mostly heard, forgot my camera today)
Book promotion in cyberspace is a “quilt of different voices.”
The late Studs Terkel on how to do a good book interview on the radio: “Read the book.”
It helps if there is a “Marita Oswald” in your life or your writing space is in [...]

National Writing Project Annual Review-Berkeley 2009

So I spent the weekend in Berkeley, CA reading for the National Writing Project Annual Review. It was an intense, gratifying time of learning (about other sites) and professional satisfaction. Over the years, I’ve decided that writing letters praising people, or in this case, writing project sites, for what they do best, and gently suggesting [...]