Dog food is a highly-charged topic among dog owners. Dog food is downright political. You get factions; you get tribes. There are those who only feed their dog a…
I remember my mother listing a whole bunch of first lines from bestselling books. “The primroses were over,” she announced theatrically. I pretended to understand what she…
I wish people would stop trying to use metaphoric language and sound “writerly”. It’s wrecking many otherwise good books. I might not have read Patrick Barkham’s beautifully delivered history on badgers,…
People working within the publishing industry just don’t understand each other. In the July 26th issue of The Bookseller, Katy Guest, editor of Independent on Sunday’s books pages…
Earlier this year, The Financial Times reported that fifty-four million workers in the US are now freelancing for a living. The word freelancing, traditionally associated with writing and journalism,…
My son gets into the car with a large frozen fish in a blue bag. He explains it is for a Sudanese dinner which involves frying just this kind…
I am in my office, a rectangle with room only for a desk and some books shelves. A big window overlooks the front garden where messy bushes lead to a…
The novelist and short story writer, Jayne Anne Phillips, stated that flash fiction taught her how to write. Phillips began as a poet but discovered through flash fiction what…
In my house, next to the kitchen phone, among the important items we don’t want to lose—keys, phones, ID cards—is a photograph of a handsome young man wearing a…
The New Yorker has always worried me. When I was younger and only aspired to be a fiction writer the New Yorker was perhaps too far a reach for…