There’s no question that Tony Doerr is one of our most lyrical and thoughtful writers. If you haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend his two collections of stories as a good place to start: The Shell Collector […]

There’s no question that Tony Doerr is one of our most lyrical and thoughtful writers. If you haven’t read any of his work, I highly recommend his two collections of stories as a good place to start: The Shell Collector […]
Yesterday I bid adieu to my Facebook wall and all the people who live there (for as long as I can, I think). It felt really interesting to wake up this morning. That strange convolution was no longer tangled up […]
This spring Swarthmore College’s students, alumni and faculty stood up to demand that the school’s Board of Managers (their trustees) divest funding in fossil fuel businesses and technologies. I reported on that here in “The State of the War on […]
Talking Writing magazine just posted an interview I did with climate activist and environmental journalist Bill McKibben called “We Don’t Require Leaders.” I urge you to go check it out. McKibben surprised me with some of his answers. The whole […]
“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.” – Roberto Bolaño, “The Savage Detectives” I have discovered the work of Chilean poet/novelist/essayist, Roberto Bolaño, in the past year. For years […]
Anthropologist Mary Douglas published a book called Natural Symbols 45 years ago. It’s a gateway into thinking about how individuals encode their perceptions of reality through the complex cosmology of cultural symbols they live in — bodily or “natural” symbols in particular. The […]
Over at Talking Writing they just posted an interview I did with the great American travel writer and chronicler of deep culture, William Least Heat-Moon. I had a lot of fun researching and preparing for this Q&A session. I think Bill […]
Over at The Millions Michael Bourne (the writer, not the center fielder) has an essay this week called “Magical Thinking: Talent and the Cult of Craft.” Lots of great comments and thinking come after his pretty thoughtful exploration of the question […]
Summer 2015: Books I’ve Read and Books I’ve Been Working On
I want to share some thoughts on what I read this summer, just so you know what writers do with all that spare time they have. At the end of this essay I also report on some of the stuff […]
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