Since a large part of the impetus for me launching the .org in 2000 was my first go-through of The Artist’s Way, I wrote about it so much in the early days of this website that it almost became a form of self-parody. Even now that I’m teaching The Artist’s Way workshops through the Continuing Education department of our parent campus, sometimes I wonder if I’ve given the programme an outsized role in my development over the past two decades. One thing is for sure,…
Between the large number of classes I wound up teaching this past spring semester, and all the other craziness that’s been sideswiping me here in 2021, my ability to do research for my next book just hasn’t been what I want it to be. When I relaunched my Patreon last summer with an exclusive-content model, where a substantial amount of that content is going to be my extended thoughts about the books I’ve been reading, I vowed that I would read a minimum of five…
My social media feeds usually have a smattering of posts from people I don’t know asking for money, especially from friends of mine reposting messages from their friends who have fallen on hard times. Needless to say, I’ve been seeing a lot more of those posts over the past year, as the loss of work caused by the pandemic has devastated tens of millions in America alone. This is especially true for those who work in art-related professions, as the ongoing economic crisis has forced…
Writing a screenplay for The Prostitutes of Lake Wiishkoban between the initial short story I came up with, and the novel it eventually became, was kind of a weird step to take, but one that was necessary for me. I’d taken a screenwriting class in undergrad, and while I’d never written a full-length screenplay before, I’d written an act of one, and a screenplay felt like a natural progression from the short story that I wrote, which felt like it was too compressed (probably because…
As I was finishing up my master’s degree in 2006, I had almost no interest in pursuing a doctorate. I’d enjoyed getting my BA in Creative Writing at the University of Toledo, and I’d definitely had a lot of good classes in graduate school there, but I’d only really stayed on because of the assistantship they’d offered me (I’d been accepted to an MFA programme in California, but they couldn’t offer me any financial assistance), and as soon as I got the opportunity to be…