When my daughter Keats was a little girl, she and I went to 4th Street in Berkeley one day to get away from the Los Gatos heat and to do a little don't-really-have-money-but-we-can-look shopping.

Someone got a macro lens and is seeing the world--bugs and flying creatures you might tend to swat–like a person deeply in love. Maybe not like a person.

When I first left home at 18 to go to college, I was back home within a year. When I left again, and then again, and then again to go to college, I kept coming home.

I've been living in my childhood town now for two years, and in a month or so I'll pack up and go back to California.

When a student warns me ahead of time, "Sorry this is so angry," I feel excited. Something real is about to happen.

Someone wrote to me that things were bad, really bad. Not only had he been hurt on his job, but when he went back he saw how terrible the working conditions really were, and so he quit.

On Tuesday in our weekly group writing class, Anne talked about how she’d had, for a lack of a better word, writer's block after the death of her adoptive dad.

To be both one thing and another thing at the same time inherently takes more energy that being just one thing.

I was listening to a recent double-guest episode of the Tim Ferriss Show because I like to hear what Seth Godin has to say about life.

Brad Ewell is a wonderful writer and photographer. He and I are playing a game: for a week he will send me one of his photographs every day, and I will write a corresponding blog post.

The mother woodchuck started lumbering around the yard when the dandelions bloomed. She methodically ate the flowers like a happy furry vacuum cleaner with whiskers.

I had an idea about how to show people just how easy it is for them to be wonderful writers, so I decided to play a game in my classes.