Royal Quiet DeLuxe

When I hear myself praising a book these days, the things I seem to be really appreciating is a fearlessness when it comes to compassion a...

One, really? I could do five with some level of comfort, but one is nearly impossible. But if I have to do one I guess it has to be Toni M...

The best memoirs—like   This Boy’s Life , or   Crazy Brave  [by Joy Harjo], for instance—bring you through a private river of storytelling...

What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here wa...

CALLE: He began by telling me that he loved my work but that many of my shows looked like open books on the wall. NERI: That’s a provoc...

I’m looking for fiction in which a heart struggles against itself, in which the messy unmanageable complexity of the world is revealed. Se...

On writing: “we’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, ...

I would say to get the character in your mind. Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. All...

I used to stop by the Creativity Explored Gallery when  lived around the corner. I'd check out the current show, maybe buy cards or gi...

I want to read everything on this list . And this one . And  this one. Photo by Nikole of Herriott & Grace

Sometimes you’re 23 and standing in the kitchen of your house making breakfast and brewing coffee and listening to music that for some rea...

For the past few years, leading up to the birth of my daughter, I have spent five mornings out of the week standing in a small walk-in fr...

It is still news to her that passion could steer her wrong though she went down, a thousand times strung out across railroad tracks, off b...

On my own website, in my worryingly thin “About” section, I make no mention of the fact that I work full-time in the marketing department ...

Photo: By William James Vincent Broadhurst via Old Time Friend

The book comes out a week from today and it's been thrilling and odd and unsettling. Lots of bloggers and reviewers got the book early...

The process of writing books is somewhat akin to a very long police interrogation in which the detective leans over the table littered w...

Daily Beast: Describe your morning routine. DH: Wake, shower, shave, dress, put music on, double espresso, fresh-fruit smoothie, oatm...

All the books are now 60% off, but Andrew McKinley, among the kindest and most generous bookstore owners on earth, will still try and m...

The right structure and the right question is: “How do you make your family hungry?” from A Simple Way to Create Suspense by Lee Child in ...

Another recent encounter has been Joyce’s “The Dead,” which I’ve read many times. It needs to be considered as a novella, the perfect nov...

A  gift guide from the gf .  Photo: Taco vs. Falafel, the T-shirt from Wendy MacNaughton

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem Here’s what I’ve got, the reasons why our marriage might work: Because you wear ...

If you had to give on piece of advice to people in their twenties, what would it be? To go to a bookstore and buy ten books of poetry a...

How like an island we are in love encouraging moss & like an island we are barely moving Just to exist takes much concentration & ...

When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not ...

Fuller's Coffee Shop , P:ear , Museum of Contemporary Craft , Pearl Bakery , Blue Sky Gallery , Charles A. Hartmann Fine Art, Powell...

You say that everything is very simple and interesting it makes me feel very wistful, like reading a great                             ...

When I teach, I tell my students: Write. Trust your own voice, your own instincts. Learn your own process. Write. Learn what works for...

I write for the same reason I read: to free fall into a story and live in that world for a while. My novels begin in tiny glimmers—of char...

I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for backg...

And the stories we tell ourselves are not the only stories. Uses for Boys Are you in Portland? I'm going to be at Wordstock on Octo...

I had just hung up from talking to you and we had been so immersed in the difficulty you were facing, and forgive me, I was thinkin...

Around 1964, Cornell, himself sixty, was looking to try sketching from a live model. The thirty-five-year-old Kusama, an admirer of his, w...

Adela, Bernice, and Charna, the youngest—all gone for a long time now, blurred into a flock sailing through memory, their long, thin legs ...

Some love for a hound dog puppy from M Dash and Animal Madness . Thank you so much.  Photo: Truman all doped up after surgery ...

So what happened? I got two years into the novel and got completely stymied and felt like it was an utter flop. I wanted to put it asi...

Below are several of M.  and my favorite date night walks: Takeout from Out the Door eaten on the benches outside the Ferry Building...

The wildly gracious Deanna and Emmett of Inside Modern in Hayes Valley donated a George Nelson Bubble Lamp to Truman the hound dog puppy...

Break your deadlines, default on your due dates, wander in the streets, go to the movies, eat lavishly, fornicate, blaspheme, bless a stre...

Another element of my memoir — the stupendous importance of love, friendship and solidarity — has been made immensely more vivid to me by ...