When I read a novel, I know that I’m engaged in a vicarious experience—I get to witness from a safe distance as the characters are challenged. When the going...

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time (too much?) thinking about the future: planning, projecting, then revising those plans and projections. Do it enough, and you...

I’m pecking away on a picture book manuscript— paring it down, and down, and down. Pretty soon it will have a negative word count, which is blank pages and...

Improbably doesn’t necessarily mean impossible. Maintain balance. Go for your dreams!

I’ve been thinking, and writing, a lot about what it means to be a man. Popular culture sends many messages, often mixed and contradictory. A rite of passage that...

Nearing the top of Dimple Hill, the 1,000+ foot elevation gain of this McDonald Forest trail run speaks to me in the language of legs and lungs, and pulse...

As a writer, words are my bread and butter, my bricks and mortar, the stuff from which I make stories. I’ve been thinking about the word “good” a lot...

As a fiction writer, it is not unusual for me to throw so much adversity at my characters that at least one (usually the protagonist) breaks under the strain...

Winter Solstice: the darkest day of the year, especially here in Oregon after a storm moved in. Solution, in my humble opinion, is twofold: 1) Literal: light candles 2)...

When something improbable happened on his Kentucky dairy farm, my friend Rube Kubale used to say, “Well, that’s a who’d-a-thought-it.” 2020, it seems to me, has been an entire...