I loved Roger Ebert’s wit and lack of pretention. His movie reviews in The Chicago Sun-Times often struck a delicate balance between honesty and generosity. He had a great sense of film history and he’d contextualize Hollywood stinkers in ways that made them interesting as artifacts of a silly and unforgiving industry. Over time, I… Continue reading Don’t Weep for the Oompa Loompas
Category: the writing life
I’ve been absent of late . . .
I think Warren Ellis puts it well in "How to Build a Blog Without Social Media": "[My website] has always been subject to pauses and hiatuses, chiefly because my job is writing and in busy periods there hasn’t always been enough writing left in me on a given day to sustain this site." This is… Continue reading I’ve been absent of late . . .
Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety
A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.” Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who… Continue reading Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety
List of resources available to writers who are refugees from Ukraine
Dominance and Submissions
Let's say you've labored long in the fields of creative writing and the People Who Know (or maybe just the people who've noticed) have appreciated your talent. Some have appreciated it loudly and publicly, some quietly to friends in ways that eventually come back to you, some through amazing feats of jealousy, and others through… Continue reading Dominance and Submissions
On Forgetting One’s Humanity
Professional writers and artists sometimes forget that they are human beings. In the immense pressure to monetize their work, develop personal commercial brands, and get recognized as professionals (because without such things, capitalist culture regards an artist as a hobbyist at best), they can forget that their art is only one part of who they… Continue reading On Forgetting One’s Humanity
Freelancing Ain’t All Wine and Roses
My recent hiatus from freelance writing culminated in an existential crisis that I now think was actually about money. It’s interesting how money—getting it, keeping it, losing it, worrying about it, hating it, enduring its fraught passage through our lives—often seems to be the underlying rule and mean in situations we first thought were about… Continue reading Freelancing Ain’t All Wine and Roses
Get ready for few changes around here.
I've been running The Writing Expedition for almost two decades in one form or another. It began as a Blogger travel blog when I was living in Bujumbura, Burundi, and grew into kind of nexus for all my publications and writing projects. This, my Pressfolios site, and my Substack newsletter have been really professionally useful, way… Continue reading Get ready for few changes around here.
If the Roof is on Fire, Just Keep Writing
Write seriously for any length of time and you learn that it’s a lonely business. Whether you’re writing essays, stories, poems, scripts, or novels, it’s just you and the page every day with no guarantee that your enormous investment of time, emotion, and energy is ever going to reach a satisfying conclusion. As Charles Bukowski… Continue reading If the Roof is on Fire, Just Keep Writing
On Taking One’s Lumps: Reading and Writing in the Here and Now
After years of teaching creative writing and going through many creative ups and downs of my own, I’ve developed a very simple philosophy to guide what I do: don’t think about it; just put it out there and move on to the next thing. Or, as a professor of mine once liked to say, be… Continue reading On Taking One’s Lumps: Reading and Writing in the Here and Now
The Writing Expedition 