Recent Doings
Maddy Bruster interviewed me about the process of writing a novel for The Creative Independent.
Stephen Fishbach interviewed me about the nuts and bolts of Treasure Island!!! and we had a fine old-timey time. You can listen here, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Look for Paraphase.
https://www.paraphrasepodcast.com
Lindsay Hunter and I spoke with one of my heroes, the elusive novelist Jane Shapiro, on Lindsay’s podcast 90’s Book Club. Read After Moondog and The Dangerous Husband and let’s start a movement to get her books back in print.
I taught a one-day workshop for Cleaver Magazine called Delusions of Grammar. Missed it? The video replay is now available for purchase.
DELUSIONS OF GRAMMAR
“All I know about grammar is its infinite power,” Joan Didion wrote, and if that sends a shiver of curiosity up and down your spine, welcome to my workshop! This one-day class is a high-energy exploration of the rhetoric of grammar: how to think strategically about form. We’ll look at how writers make decisions when they confront a sentence: the patterns sentences typically follow and the different ways clauses hang together. By the class’s end, you’ll be able to diagnose what makes a sentence boring and tweak it until it has more suspense than a Netflix thriller.
The Johnson Girls’ theatrical adaptation of Treasure Island!!!
One of the highlights of my life. Richard was played by a puppet.
The Spotify playlist for Treasure Island!!!
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
A conversation I was lucky enough to have with Nicholson Baker at the Chicago Humanities Festival in which I ask him what he does with his mean thoughts, as well as how he came up with his scary potato horror story.