There are six books in the Poppy series. That was never the plan. Yes, the last chapter of Poppy begins: “Almost thirteen full moons to the night Ocax killed Ragweed, Poppy and her husband, Rye (how they met and married is another story) … ” Though I had written just that I had no particular plan to go
When I was a boy, living in New York City, my parents took The New York Times. I thought it was a very dull paper. It had no cartoons, not even political ones. Its rival, The New York Herald Tribune, not only had cartoons, but ran a daily serial for kids by Thornton W. Burgess.
I had been visiting schools that year, importantly, long before the lengthy Harry Potter books were so popular. I had begun asking students what they were reading. A surprising number of them were telling me they were reading novels by Stephen King. The surprise— (to me and to their teachers)—was that these kids were reading
For about eight months I lived in Corvallis, Oregon because my wife had a semester’s visiting professorship at Oregon State University. The university had a bookstore and one day I was browsing among the remaindered books. For some reason one book caught my attention. It was written by a naturalist who worked in a forest.
Many people, like myself, find old barns attractive. It’s not just the weathered architecture: I sense the traces of many hands, many beasts, crops, the working lives, all of which grow old with grace and dignity. One day I was in northern California, looking at such an old barn. Actually, I was doing more than
I was living in Los Angeles, so, naturally, I wrote a fantasy about New York City. What’s more I sold it to a publisher. But as I continued to think about the book I had a crucial (and a self-critical) thought: It’s a story about NYC and there are no people of color or Hispanics
When I was a student at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) my focus was theatre. As it happened, the Theatre Department organized a group of students to perform Othello, Shakespeare’s great tragedy in schools throughout the large state of Wisconsin. This was, to put it mildly, a deeply edited version of the play, which, when
Today, the sixteenth of May, I am having a new book published: The Unexpected Life of Oliver Cromwell Pitts (Algonquin). It has already received very fine reviews and I am hard at work on the sequel, but.… As artistic events go, the official publishing of a book is one of the quietest of artistic events.
It will no doubt date me when I reveal that one of the key influences on my writing life was radio. I am not referencing music here, but radio drama, in particular those shows sent out over the airwaves (as they were called) to young people like me. If I was home sick there were the
Ernest Hemingway has the literary reputation for precise, uncluttered writing. Is it justified? Elmore Leonard famously objected to the use of exclamation points (!) to juice up the energy of prose. Did he follow his own advice? E.B. White urged readers to curtail using the word “not” to describe actions. Describe actions, he urged, in