Sometimes Our Writer Friends Know Just What to Say

My writer’s group was discussing Ruta Sepetys’s wonderful book, YOU The Story, A Writer’s Guide to Craft Through Memory. Sepetys advises writers to use our own backgrounds and experiences as grist for our fiction. One of the questions she suggests we pay attention to is: “What elements of your childhood self still exist in your…

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Love Stories Are the Best

My husband claims that people take one look at me and start spilling their life stories. To be honest, it’s kind of true. I think folks can tell I’m genuinely interested. Sometimes

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Picking a Partner

The other day, I was talking with my English composition class about the importance of identifying their criteria of evaluation in working on their upcoming “write a review” assignment. I pointed out that in our everyday lives, we’re constantly doing evaluations

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Psychic Pleasures

Years ago, I took a communications course from a professor who announced on the first day, “There’s no such thing as altruism.” A staunch proponent of exchange theory, he insisted that all social interactions are governed by people’s desire to gain a reward in exchange for providing something of value to others. I gamely attempted…

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