Truly great high school teachers are crafty as hell. Not quilting crafty or Cricket crafty, but psychologically crafty. The raw material they work with is the adolescent brain, a transitional cauldron of hormones, ignorance, ego, insecurity, emotional extremes, and, often

It was a dumb and unnecessary confession I’d made, an unforced error that unleashed against me a hellish fifteen-minute long stern good talking to.  This by a high school English teacher, no less, and, worse, a fastidiously strict grammarian. We’d

And so art meets the real world. Agents are not to blame for Alice’s failure. They are in a business. Publishers are in a business. They need to make money, and the enormous amount of time and money that would

Don’t think it’s lost on me that the incident with my kid’s typewriter and the improbable result of my  typing my own name, when I’d yet to study the alphabet or the sounds of its letters, was essentially the Infinite

When I was in high school, Loren Cornwell was the hippest, coolest teacher to have ever walked the face of the planet. It didn’t matter that he was short, bald, nearsighted, or portly. He wore denim like a king wears

I had to have been between four and five years old when I was first stricken with the writer’s curse. So let’s say it was 1965 or 1966.  I’ll get to the reasons why it was a curse in follow-up