Blog

Want a good writerly side job? You’re going to eat anyway. You’re going to write anyway. Get paid to do both! In the early 1990s, my wife showed me an advertisement in the largest newspaper in Maine. The newspaper was searching for a new anonymous restaurant critic, the old one having lasted just a short time. About five years later, having published 258 restaurant reviews and eaten 790 professional meals, I could understand why the previous critic dropped out. It’s no p

I didn’t know why I wrote the novel Paradise until I had gained what I did gain on its last day of writing. Then I knew. My long...

Maine! That crinkled shoreline. Suppose you are a seagull. You decide to fly from the southern end of Maine’s coastline where it meets...

To a non-writer, it might seem that writing a memoir is easy. You know what happened—just tell the truth. Here’s a passage from a good...