Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
I avoided Covid-19 for nearly three years, but it has finally caught up with me. On Tuesday night, I began feeling a tingle in my throat. Wednesday resembled the beginnings of a cold. My fever began Thursday. It wasn't until Friday, though, when I heard that one of my colleagues had tested positive, that I... Continue Reading →
I need to keep it short this weekend. This weekend I'm meeting with my writing group and have stories of theirs to read and comment on. And then I've signed up for another writing class that I'm doing over this weekend, about short story beginnings, also through One Story, since I had such a good... Continue Reading →
One of the things I love about teaching literature is the way its central questions push my thinking. Usually teacher-Jimmy and writer-Jimmy inhabit distinct mental spaces, but sometimes the two dovetail alongside. With the start of the new school year, meeting new students, lesson planning, checking how advisees are settling in, I got to have... Continue Reading →
Writing can be isolating. As a story forms itself and finds its way onto the page, as we craft, dismantle, and reassemble it in final form, the work is solitary. At its best, this solitude is glorious--writing is where we can be perfectly alone and let the mind go where it will, where any thoughts... Continue Reading →
On Friday, we said goodbyes to our graduating second-year students. In this international community, where these young people gather for two years in a crucible of five-students-to-a-room mayhem, of intense exams capping a rigorous curriculum, of a plethora of student-organized events, of all the pangs of teenage life, the parting is hard. They have come... Continue Reading →
Sometimes in my writing journey these last several years, I have taken issue with old writing advice--the mandate to show, don't tell; the focus on active verbs that overshadows the great work other verbs do; Western literature's myopic focus on conflict--these are all pieces of inherited writing wisdom that, with deeper thought on my own... Continue Reading →
After a glitteringly beautiful August, the rainy days have come. Bands of mist hang against the sides of the mountains, and the colors have muted themselves, clamped closer together in the wet. Sometimes I feel confused about rain. There is of course beauty in rainy days. Particular things, like the water clinging to grass blades,... Continue Reading →
I remember a fable I heard once, from some origin that I can no longer locate. I think I was told this story by a speaking voice, perhaps by a teacher at school, perhaps elsewhere. The situation of its telling has thus vanished, but I remember the story perfectly. Let me share it with you... Continue Reading →
In the north of Minnesota, lakes patchwork the great conifer-birch forest. Land lies flat to the water like it might buckle and sink down, and sphagnum bogs pull the water up and inland, drowning trees and leaving old gray skeletons. Water insects ride the surface tension in great swarms, dotting it like rain does, to... Continue Reading →
I am writing this post early, on Thursday, July 15. When it posts early Sunday morning, I'll be in a tent in northern Minnesota, hopefully sleeping soundly. This trip with my dad and father-in-law was meant to happen last summer, but Covid restrictions postponed our plans a year. Now we are sorting through our final... Continue Reading →
Words like trees 