Personal Essays

A journalist and mom goes to her son's third-grade class to teach writing ~ and instead becomes the grateful student

Every morning I wake up and do exactly what selfcarefederation.org and everydayhealth.com and verywellmind.com and all those other “take care of yourself” sites and blogs and organizations tell me not…

Two months into my just-the-facts-ma’am, inverted pyramid life as a novice reporter assigned to cover every commission had that ever been formed anywhere in any municipality on Earth at any…

It was the mid-1990s. I was sitting across a white damask table-clothed table at a midtown Manhattan steak house watching my editor, Bob Loomis, alternately cut into a ribeye and…

As a man grieves his dog, he argues that the best writing is as much about the feeling as it is about the words

For most of my life, feedback made me anxious.I was in third grade when my mom came home from a parent-teacher conference with this pronouncement. “Your teacher said your math…

Who we are when we encounter a story can have a lot to do with how we engage with that story and what meaning we take from it. Our age,…

As a columnist and a memoir writer, a fundamental question I confront when I begin a piece is this: Do I view and portray this topic as black-and-white, or do…

Every year, or as often as I can, I go into the northern Minnesota woods, usually alone now, seeking tranquility and time to brood and reflect.And I write while I’m…

I learned much of what I value about writing from a man who lost his voice. A slender, black-eyed Panamanian, José Quintero was a legend in the American theater and…