Before lightning strikes feeders unseen to the ordinary I travel possible paths through the air to find the right way to bolt to earth. Before the secret green cells in the leaf drink from its suncatchers, light walks all paths through the protein scaffold. Scientists say that any road taken collapses all possible paths. In…

In “Which Was the Dream?”, a story begun the year after his beloved Susy’s sudden death from meningitis, Mark Twain attributes a series of terrifying dreams to a child character called “Bessie”. There is good reason to think that Bessie (“all soap-bubbles and rainbows and fireworks”) was modeled closely on Susy’s childhood self. It is…

I invited my friend Wanda Burch, the author of She Who Dreams, to contribute a guest article for this blog today. She is both a dream teacher and a trained historian who grew up in the South. She has been researching the dreams of soldiers and their families during the American Civil War for a…

I don’t read many books on writing, but Stephen King’s On Writing, by a consummate practitioner of the craft, is one I return to. I warm to his insistence that stories are “found objects” that must be excavated with care, like archaeological finds, rather than schemes to be brainstormed and constructed through formula plotting. He…

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