Eleven books for twelve dollars. Money well spent.
Last month, I went to the Rolla (Missouri) Public Library’s fall book sale and came home with a nice haul of reading materials. It was $12 well spent, and the money went to support our local library.
Here’s what I got, and what I hope to read over the holidays and beyond:
Continue reading “Library book sale haul”How powerful first lines can draw your reader into your story.
One lesson the professors at journalism school drilled into my head was the importance of crafting a compelling first paragraph (aka the lede in news parlance).
The opening paragraph is the most important element of your story. It must grab readers’ attention and get them to read more, so it must be finely crafted and honed to its sharpest possible point.
The same applies to more literary writing–whether a novel, a short story, or a creative nonfiction essay. These five opening sentences from some recent stories and essays do a good job of hooking the reader. Each example below comes from The Pushcart Prize XLIX: Best of the Small Presses 2025 Edition. And while there are other notable pieces I could have pulled from this anthology, I chose these five because they are great and because you can also read them online, for free.
Continue reading “Friday Five: grand openings”‘Although they are fiction, I want the stories to seem real, so I am very specific in describing actual places, and I hew closely to what I know.’
In her short story “A Fait Accompli,” which recently won the Short Story Substack award for a story about family, Kate Kinney deftly weaves a poignant and powerful tale of an elderly widow who escapes her assisted-living residence for a holiday shopping spree but cannot escape the control of her power-of-attorney-wielding son nor certain elements of her past. Written in a first-person voice and steeped in realism, “A Fait Accompli” combines detail and seemingly mundane events with a view into the main character’s interior life and memories. The result is a whimsical story that holds the reader’s attention to the very end.
An educator as well as a writer, Kate chairs the Department of English at Suffolk County Community College in New York, where she also teaches writing and literature. She earned her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is a 2025-2026 Writers Institute Fellow, and attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, The Toronto Journal, Superpresent Magazine, The New York Times, and NomadArtX. As a literary scholar, she has studied the influence of another writer named Kate: Kate Chopin. She co-edited the book Kate Chopin in Contexts: From Theory to Practice and is the author of the articles “Kate Chopin: A Woman of and Beyond Her Time” and “Teaching Chopin Through Multimedia.”
Read on to learn how Kate Kinney gleans story magic from the everyday, how her work as a teacher influences her writing, and how binge-watching The Walking Dead informed her favorite essay.
Continue reading “Friday Five: writer, educator, and Short Story Substack winner Kate Kinney”‘A delayed dream feels even sweeter when achieved’
In his book Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life, Henry Oliver highlights how some of our world’s most successful people — Vera Wang, Frank Lloyd Wright, Julia Child — achieved their most notable successes later in life. This week’s featured writer, Tracie Adams, might feel at home among those late bloomers. For Tracie, that second act began last year at age 58 with the publication of her first writings in various literary magazines. Her memoir, Our Lives in Pieces: A Collection of Flash Memoir Essays, came out earlier this year and has been praised for its honest reflections on life’s joys and sorrows.
A writer since childhood (when she wrote “truly awful poems about horses and mushrooms”), Tracie spent twenty-five years teaching writing to her four homeschooled children on her family farm in Virginia along with hundreds of other homeschooled and private-schooled kids. “While teaching writing and literature was rewarding,” she writes on her website, “I have found immeasurable joy in retirement as I have finally begun publishing my creative nonfiction work in literary magazines.” And we her readers are the better for it.
Continue reading “Friday Five: ‘Our Lives in Pieces’ memoirist Tracie Adams”A Father’s Day weekend conversation about this new genre and the appeal of “voicey, moral, unwieldy, independent, ambitious, and impatient” literary men.
With Father’s Day just around the corner, it seems appropriate and timely to shine the Friday Five spotlight on Daniel Roberts, a historian, writer, and host of the Dad Lit podcast, which is available on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
A professional historian, Dan has many published works of history, but no published works of fiction — not yet, at least. He is the author of the biography, The American: The Life, Times, and War of Basil Antonelli, the story of an Italian-American immigrant that Amazon describes as “a quintessentially American biography of immigration, assimilation, and sacrifice.” Currently he is on submission with two novels, The Black Hole Pact, a Sci Fi novel about a woman investigating her father’s role in saving the world from a killer asteroid, and Cursed at the Hanging Pine Inn, a horror novel best described as The Shining meets Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
He established the Dad Lit Pod earlier this year, not long after a bit of hand-wringing in The New York Times about the disappearance of the literary man (a topic I also blogged about). So the topics Dan delves into on his podcast have never been more timely.
As you might expect from such a booster of Dad Lit, Dan is himself a dad. He’s the father to a four-year-old girl and has been blissfully married for eight years.
Continue reading “Friday Five: historian, writer, and Dad Lit podcaster Dan Roberts”
