Books, Chocolate, Sundries.

I’m at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, and it’s like the setting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’ve been to Bread Loaf a few times before, and the history of this place always staggers me. Here’s just a sampling of the writers who’ve been here over the years: Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Eudora [...]

Tags: Bread Loaf, Bread Loaf writers conference

Cures for Heartbreak is released in paperback today! I’m really excited. It looks pretty much the same as the hardcover, just skinnier. Like the hardcover went on a diet. Both are 238 pages…and looking at this even slimmer version, one would not think it would’ve taken a person EIGHT YEARS to finish writing it. (If [...]

Tags: Cures for Heartbreak

Today is the ten year anniversary of my father’s death, and I can’t believe it’s been ten years. In January it will be eighteen years since my mother died. Ten and eighteen years sounds so enormously and unfathomably long…but in some ways it feels like no time has passed at all. The new YA novel [...]

Tags: grief, William Maxwell

I’ve been back from Sewanee for two weeks, but I still think about it every day. It’s one of those experiences where every second feels heightened, feels alive; you’re completely taken out of your regular life and placed in this different world, and when you return to your life you’re inevitably changed. As a writer, [...]

Tags: Aaron Baker, Darrin Doyle, Dave Mullins, David Caudle, David Roby, Eric McHenry, James Scott, Jason Ockert, Josh Weil, Katrina Vandenberg, Kimberly Johnson, Margot Livesey, Michael Dumanis, Mike Rosovsky, Porochista Khakpour, Randall Kenan, Ryan Call, Sandra Beasley, Sewanee, Sewanee Writers' Conference

One of the most interesting things that I learned while doing the research for this essay was how James Patterson’s YA series Maximum Ride went from being sold only in the YA section of Barnes & Noble to being sold only in the adult section. When I first read this article in the New York [...]

I was brushing my hair the other day and had the sudden urge to attempt to style it in the fashion of the Crazy Polygamist Cult Ladies of Eldorado, TX. (When in Texas make like the natives, right?) Then I thought: Halloween! If I could round up a bunch of women and we all did [...]