No man is an island, but many boys and girls are. The function of validation and attention is to raise awareness of one’s responsibility to that continent of humankind. Of course attention can be bought for the shock of a fifth grade moon, and validation sold for a song, but the reap is thin and spent before the confetti hits the ground. Praise? Pah. Best not require that variable. Better to keep one ear closed if you’re going to...

Last night my wife and I held our dog Boo one last time. I kissed her on the head as her heart slowed to stop. We’d been at this same emergency  hospital, staffed with wonderful people, just six months before with our thirteen -year old Italian Greyhound Teddy after a cancerous tumor hemorrhaged in his abdomen.  We would decide the next day to end his suffering.  Boo came as an unexpected gift into our lives while we were...

Go read this brilliant and hilarious blog. Go on. Do it right now. If you like what you see, I suggest dropping what you’re doing and immediately reading every single story in the “Best Of” list on the right-hand side of the page. You won’t regret it. You’re welcome in...

I didn’t take my first writer’s workshop until I was a fifth-year junior at University of Michigan. I did not take to them right away. I had never faced the sadomasochistic barrage that is a session of such a class. There seemed to be no correlation between talent and vileness. Being able to do something and being able to help someone else do likewise are disparate talents rarely joined in an individual. So it was that one of...

So it doesn’t look promising for me to become Lady Gaga’s editorial assistant for an issue of Metro. What? I know it surprises you that in spite of my qualifications both with language and with knowing myself thoroughly enough to answer her prime interview question, “Why were you born this way?” with forethought, hindsight, and panache—that in fact, some other monster would be preferred. I really thought I stood a chance....

My grandfather is a published writer of mystery novels, and he once gave me a bit of advice that is something special to me: when a story has a twist ending, the twist has to make everything make more sense, rather than less. We call him Bampa in our family because of a mispronunciation of his name by my oldest sibling. Bampa taught me something else, for better or worse. He taught me that the life of a writer is best lived so as to make...

For a semester I took a class from a man who seemed to dislike me on sight, the writer Colson Whitehead. I was told he had  MacArthur genius grant and so I had high expectations going in.  Such status is almost on the level of Nobel prize and I came in thinking highly of man knowing only his writing. The first session we had with him, he started off by saying he would tell us something about himself, and then it would go the next person,...

Sometimes a writer comes to a crossroads that causes her to pose a question she never really asked before. Until that moment the answer was assumed, implied in the act of writing. Thus, the asking must indicate an interruption, however brief. Pause gives space to deem it—a thought bubble tossing on an opalescent sea. Writing is an act and a meditation—the friction that not only the product of writing differs, but both means and agent,...

I’m writing jokes these days, as in: How many Lutherans does it take to change a lightbulb? Lutherans don’t change lightbulbs; they reform them. I started writing them after we read Mimi Schwartz’s essay “Elegy for an Optimist” in my Intro. to Creative Writing Class. It’s an illuminating downer–about Schwartz’s father-in-law who suffered too much and too long due to those dogged physicians who...

I should write short stories. I keep at this novel ambition while I have yet to produce anything other than pieces of one that please me.  Walk to run to fly. That kind of thing. I haven’t written one in some time. When I did, it was from the perspective of a young black man. I am not joking. It all started when a teacher at grad school, the estimable Colum McCann, gave me one of his savory, lilting maxims. He said something like,...