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.
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.
Sam Lamott was too busy being an art student and the father of a 2-year-old to show up at a book signing for “Some Assembly Required,” the book he wrote with his mother, the best-selling author Anne Lamott. But Anne was present and had pithy things to say about writing — and being the mother of a 22-year-old father. Read more.