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In-Flight Entertainment

In-Flight Entertainment Helen Simpson Alfred A. Knopf, February 2012 176 pages $24 This post was written by Caitlin O’Neil. Waiting for a Helen Simpson short story collection is like waiting for a...

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Canada

Canada Richard Ford Ecco, May 2012 432 pages $27.99 I found myself humming Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” while reading Richard Ford’s Canada—only instead of “Joe Diamaggio,” I sang “Frank...

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The Immanence of God in the Tropics

The Immanence of God in the Tropics George Rosen Leapfrog Press, September 2012 167 pages $15.95 George Rosen performs a neat, almost anachronistic trick in his new book of seven stories, The Immanence...

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Writing is Like Walking

Writing is a mysterious task. Unlike changing a tire or tying your shoelaces, there is no prescribed list of steps that must be undertaken to succeed. Which is why I often find myself comparing the...

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Writing is Like Cooking

Roasted Carrot Soup. Photograph by Food52.com. Today I decided to make roasted carrot soup, which got me thinking that writing and cooking are particularly ripe for comparison. At first glance, both...

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Writing Is Like Baseball

Every March my eyes turn south toward spring training. The sunburned announcers report from director’s chairs on games that don’t count. The players work on their autographs and perfect their...

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Riding In Cars With Words

Photo by tofuart On long car rides with my father, you could count on hearing three questions: What kind of cow is that? What kind of roof is that? Is the moon waxing or waning? My answers were always...

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Writing is Like Mixing a Drink

Mixing a drink is seductive in a way writing will never be. The ice sweating in the glass. The chucka, chucka of the metal shaker growing cold in your hands. The invisible melding going on inside that...

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What You Can Learn About Writing from Children’s Books

I’ve spent the last year and a half brushing up on reading that for the last three decades or so I’ve been neglecting. Since my daughter was born, I’ve been diving deep into the literary canon, paging...

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Reading Aloud: It’s Not Just for Kids Anymore

Photo courtesy TOM81115 As I wrote in my last post, I’ve been reading a lot of children’s books lately, out loud to my daughter. (She doesn’t seem to hear them when I read silently.) It’s made me more...

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Writing Is Like Going on Vacation

Photo: Rutja76, CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Over the past few months I’ve compared writing to walking, mixing a drink, cooking, and baseball, and you’ve indulged my metaphorical ramblings. But...

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Betting on First Books

Photo courtesy Laura Loveday I thought it had been about three years since I sent my first novel out to agents.  Turns out it was six.  Like the rest of the world, publishing has changed since 2007. A...

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What Netflix Taught Me About Character Development

I didn’t teach this summer so I was able to catch up on my cultural literacy—reading books and also binge-watching TV. Netflix is my dealer of choice, delivering whole seasons of House of Cards, Orange...

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Writing Is Like Going Back to School

photo by manyhighways So, if you don’t believe writing is like vacation, perhaps I can convince you it’s like going back to school? Whether we’re still in school or not, there’s a refocusing that comes...

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Punctuation I Have Known And Loved

by Leo Reynolds Fall is correcting season for me, and while I try not to turn into the grammar police while I’m reading, I usually cannot resist the chance to amend errors. One of my all time favorites...

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Revising Like Alice(s)

There has been a flurry of praise for Alices lately—Munro for her much-deserved Nobel, McDermott for her highly-praised new novel Someone—and it has me thinking about why these two authors are having a...

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Writing is Like Making Snowballs

Photo by redjar It snowed today. It was supposed to snow, but only for a minute, and it was not supposed to stick.  Instead it snowed all day and as the sun went down at 4:30 (alas) the snow was still...

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My Dog Made Me A Better Writer

Two years ago next week, my dog died. I still miss him for many reasons, but what I miss the most is his companionship while I write.  It’s a strange thing to sit inside all day, not even on the phone...

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Writing is Not Like…

For the past year or so, I’ve contemplated the ways that writing is like many other everyday tasks we undertake. In that time, I’ve reached for some unlikely comparisons. (See baseball, cooking, going...

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