Category: Friday Five

Friday Five: Some thoughts on ‘Writers on Writing’

What some of the best in the craft say about voice and rhythm, getting started, similes and metaphors, and the need for writers to “admit that nothing in this world makes sense.”

It was a cool winter’s day and I was on a minor dusting spree when I discovered tucked away in a far corner of my bookcase a paperback called Writers on Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology. Published in 1991 by Middlebury College Press and edited by a couple of Middlebury English professors, Robert Pack and Jay Parini (neither of whom I’d heard of), the list of authors displayed on the cover piqued my interest. There, presented on a slant, a graphic treatment no doubt trendy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, was an all-star cast of writers I recognized–Stanley Elkin, Richard Ford, John Irvin, Erica Jong, Joyce Carol Oates, Tim O’Brien–along with many names I didn’t. Holding the book in my non-dusting hand, I studied the cover and concluded I must have purchased it at some long ago library book sale, then tucked it away for safekeeping. (I’m always a sucker for books about the writing craft, and buy any I find, especially if they’re cheap.)

I set aside the dust rag and began reading. Dusting would have to wait.

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Friday Five: Cowboy Jamboree’s Adam Van Winkle, author of ‘Count the Dust’

‘The idea became intriguing for me: write a play to be read.’

Radio plays have been around for a century or more, practically since the advent of radio. They thrived during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s–an era sometimes called the Golden Age of Radio. In his latest novel, Count the Dust (LEFTOVER Books, December 2025), writer and literary magazine editor Adam Van Winkle taps into that approach to create a distinctive story designed for radio but equally enjoyable as a good read.

Count the Dust is set in a nameless small town in southern Oklahoma or north Texas. It’s modeled after the place where Adam grew up, Texoma, but, as he writes, it could be any of the “many small Oklahoma and Texas towns I’ve been in and through that center around a filling station on a state highway.” It’s a murder mystery, told over two time periods–1967, the year of the murder, and 1997–as well as a story of “the persistence of offspring in unideal circumstances.”

“These places, like places I grew up in and around, with little money, little resources, drugs, guns, violence, strained marriages and poisonous relationships, they still find a way to produce progeny. People still meet through the circumstance of life, new people still get born.”

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