G.K. Chesterton once said: If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. I live by this philosophy when I teach writing. It seems to me vastl….

The real meaning of a poem is to stop time..

Use your notebook to breathe in the world around you..

You don't learn to write by going through a series of preset writing exercises. You learn to write by grappling with a real subject that truly matter….

When someone you love dies, you get a big bowl of sadness put down in front of you, steaming hot. You can start eating now, or you can let it cool an….

When students write from experience, they can breathe those specifics into their writing- dialect, odd smells, precise names of plants- that can anim….

If you want to write poetry, you must have poems that deeply move you. Poems you can't live without. I think of a poem as the blood in a blood transf….

Good writing happens when human beings follow particular steps to take control of their sentences-to make their words do what they want them to do..

It's misleading to think of writers as special creatures, word sorcerers who possess some sort of magical knowledge hidden from everyone else. Writer….

Writing becomes beautiful when it becomes specific, concrete..

Here's the secret of writing: there is no secret..

Poems are the 'daredevil' of writing because a poem will say what nobody else wants to say..