Tag: #amwriting

She liked it, she really liked it!

I am so pleased to share the news with you that on September 1, 2017, Booklist’s Donna Seaman, published a really, really warm review of And These Are the Good Times: ‘Short story writer McNair (The Temple of Air, 2011) proves to be an irresistible personal essayist of refreshing candor, vibrant openheartedness, rueful humor, and unassuming wisdom. In the […]

Beautiful Sentence #16 – #20 (or Beautiful Paragraph) ~ Ben Tanzer

“We were in the back of the station wagon, and I know you are supposed to keep your eyes closed, because that’s what Joe told me, and possibly a character played by Molly Ringwald, but I didn’t, and I rarely did. I liked to watch, and as we shifted into some kind of compromising position, […]

TBT: Ragdale High School Arts Week

A memory from less than a month ago, when I had the uplifting and inspiring opportunity to work with young writers during Ragdale Foundation’s High School Arts Week. What follows below comes from their journals. I’ve Been Told A Found-ish Ensemble List Poem I remember sitting in the backseat, looking through night-stained windows, watching fireworks […]

TBT: Mom Memories

Fifteen years ago yesterday, on August 9, 2002, my mother, Sylvia McNair, died in the very early hours of the morning. This photo is one that my dear friend the novelist Eric Charles May had enlarged and framed for me after that loss. We are in the Hilton Hotel, drinking with our buddies after a […]

Monday Morning

“You write down a few sentences in your journal and sigh. This exhalation is not exhaustion but anticipation at the prospect of a wonderful tale exposing a notion that you still only partly understand.” ~ Walter Mosley, source: “Writers on Writing,” New York Times

Beautiful Sentence #15 ~ Jack Driscoll

“And so go ahead and try following them across the stark, windswept pastures and fields of white moose and deer and coyote, and just see how long before you’re completely turned around out there where the spirit world is everywhere alive.” – Jack Driscoll, “That Story,” The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot