“Writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock.”

I’d started to visit Olivia more often because it was obvious she was lonely. The ALS lady who’d been moved to Hopkins had been Aunt Olivia’s closest friend, leaving aside Merton Hillstead, who actually went home. 

Little Edgar came home from school wanting to do something to help Little Rose. The “little” thing was something they’d picked up from a classmate’s mother who’d visited the school to talk about Personal Empowerment. She felt that no child should be slighted by being called “little” or “junior” or any other diminutive. 

Yancey swishes down the dirt road, feet aflutter. The dog has always half hopped, and now that she wears little rubber booties, after two nasty bouts of bacterial infection in her paw pads, her dance-like

John decided to leave for the wedding on Thursday night in order to avoid the Friday traffic. They’d encounter it on their return, no way around that, with thousands of cars on I-95 regardless of the high price of gas.

Most nights my neighbor, a middle-aged man in a red hoodie, would stand on his front porch, reaching up every now and then to knock the icicle Christmas lights dangling from the porch roof back and forth.

  Andre Dubus and I were once on book tour together. Because he was wheelchair-bound by this time, we were transported by hired car. Outside Boston, actually not so close to Boston, the car broke down. Do I remember correctly that this happened on…

  Harry Mathews began publishing in The Paris Review in 1962, with an excerpt from his first novel, The Conversions. After that, he gave us ­poems, translations, and more fiction, much of it composed according to occult mathematical formulas of h…

Good artists imitate; great artists steal. In our series Stolen, writers share stories of theft.   Long, long ago, in the faraway kingdom of Virginia, a tall, somewhat-handsome man came to town. He had a rather well-known art gallery for a …

Today, I wrote a friend for advice about packing. I’ll be going from Virginia to Nashville to New York City, after which I’ll be flying to Rome for three weeks. My friend mentioned that his wife takes up more than her share of their suitcase,…

In our new series, Procrastination Confessional, writers share the strange things they do to avoid writing.   It has long been my assertion that writers will do anything in order to avoid writing. Ask any of my former students. Teaching used to be…

Write or grow things with which you’re unfamiliar.

No, not dying. Not just yet.* But already, still at home, the feeling of jet lag begins. Time seems omnipresent, yet too brief. Birthday presents are opened early. I stare at the bag from the pharmacy. Is this any time to try the antipsychotic? (Pres…

The sounds of Key West. [portfolio_slideshow include="67525,67526,67527,67529,67530,67531" exclude="67528"] What do writers want? (Forget whether they’re women or men, Uncle Sigmund. Forget money and fame.) They want quiet. Where do they go? They…

[portfolio_slideshow include="67076, 67075, 67074, 67073, 67072, 67071, 67070, 67069, 67068, 67067" exclude="66531,66532,66533,66534,66535,66538,66560"] Bob Adelman’s amazing photographs—the majority of them black-and-white prints—fill the sec…

Like every other person in school, I hated footnotes. That was what you’d be quizzed on and lose out, having watched the soaring bird while forgetting the gnat. They were a trap. Boring. Even the texts were boring (I thought then, along with my tea…