Veteran journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life as she knows it.
Here you'll find author profiles as well as mini – and not-so-mini – book reviews. I’m a writer who loves to talk about writing, so if you like to write I hope you’ll stop by now and then for some writing tips and to chat about the writing life.
I’ve been writing personal essays, newspaper columns and blog posts for years now. I’ve learned some writing tricks the hard way — by trial and error. Others I’ve just plain stolen from my various writing coaches. Here are some of my favorite personal essay writing tips.
When I’m writing a personal essay or a blog post, I find that nice stories in which I behave well and come off looking good generally don’t work so well. I look for the bad story, the ugly story, the story that shows off my marvelous human shortcomings.
What’s rhetoric? I’ve always thought of it as the high-flown language of politics. But really, it’s something we humans do all the time, and that includes the two-year-old humans among us.
To save money, management had cut my hours back to one day a week. I did what every self-respecting writer does when she’s ticked off at the world. I sat down at the keyboard – and wrote. Read more.
Walk around Lake Michigan . . . the whole thing. I’d start in late spring and finish up in the fall. And when I was done, I’d write a book about it. Lucky for me, Loreen Niewenhuis beat me to it.
I’m a writer, but whenever I visit my friend Nancy Selvin’s ceramics studio, I wonder whether I’d rather be working with something more tangible than words and ideas — like clay.
I bought Heather Donahue’s book about marijuana farming, "Grow Girl," because she’s a writer friend of a writer friend of mine. This is what happened.