If you look at the practice of 'crisis management,' and maybe squint at it a little, you can make out in the corners of your vision the ghosts or the vestiges of a much older, but still thoroughly American, form of public life, one centered not on pu...
Reviewers try to square the antics of a writer's life with the antics in the fiction. Even satirical verbal play is too often read and admired as autobiographical expression. And thanks to the democratic exposures of the web, it's easier than ever to...
I have lived in Kentucky all of my life. I am married to my high school sweetheart, David, a local police captain who has no shame in telling his coworkers that he is the inspiration for all of my heroes.
There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and ...
So for instance it becomes clear why space and time and even the properties of matter itself depend on the observer in consciousness. In fact when you take this point of view it even explains why the laws of the universe themselves are fine tuned for...
Most believers struggle to really believe in the supernatural as a meaningful, deterministic reality except during moments when they are drawn to it, perhaps during a worship service or while reading a novel like 'Adam.' Being drawn to this truth is ...
My number one goal was not getting 'A's' - and I proved it. I was a 'C' student. You have to be ready to learn. If you're not interesting in learning, it doesn't work. As I grew older and wanted to learn and desperately wanted inside information, lea...
While learning to code may have once been an arduous or expensive process, the college dropouts who developed Codecademy have democratized coding as surely as Gutenberg democratized text. Anyone can go to Codecademy and start learning and creating co...
I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.
If I could give a shout-out to anything in the childhood world, I have to say 'Daniel Tiger.' I want to write a love letter to everyone on that staff. It is so perfectly, thoughtfully, lovingly done. And as a parent, it is the one thing out of everyt...
I do write by hand. I just think - I don't know, it's a physical thing for me. It's a bodily thing. It literally has to earn its way through my hand.
I loved every place I lived and traveled. London, Paris, Rome, Venice. I fell hard for Central America and Mexico. In each country, I had fantasies that I could live there.
The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.
The flowered trim on the hems [of the dress] seemed superfluous, even frivolous, but at the same time it comforted her, as though the idea that a seamstress had thought to adorn clothing so innocently implied that somewhere, innocence was safe.
I really learned a lot when I worked on my grandpa's film 'Twixt' and got to be with him start to finish and sit next to him every day. That was my film school.
I think I would have written more books if I'd had fewer kids or had them earlier, but I think the books in general would have had a little less spark to them.
I think I have something that belongs to you'. I held out my open hand, the stone resting in my palm. I expected her to take it. Instead she took the whole hand, and held it.
The thing that reinforces my belief about that is having worked the last four years with the Safe Kids Campaign on a national basis. I am so amazed at what these little kids do in keeping their parents alerted to what they are there for.
That is why we are working with these various groups that have volunteers. We can get a lot of these things done. Nobody has dropped out, and a lot of people would like to join. We now know what each other does.
In 1880 at the Military Hospital at Constantine, I discovered, on the edges of the pigmented spherical bodies in the blood of a patient suffering from malaria, filiform elements resembling flagellae which were moving very rapidly, displacing the neig...
People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.
