Close view of the round keys of a vintage manual typewriter

The journal · Written monthly, more or less

Notes from a writing life

Short essays on craft, weather, libraries, and the particular business of making fiction in the middle of Michigan.

Writing Before the Furnace Kicks On

There is a window of about forty minutes on an October morning when the house is warm enough to sit in but the furnace has not yet woken for the season, and the silence has a texture I spend all summer missing. This essay is about that window — why the first drafts of all three novels were written inside it, why longhand slows a sentence down to the speed at which it can actually be thought, and what I tell students who ask whether the notebook matters. It matters the way a riverbank matters: not as the water, but as the thing that gives the water its shape.

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2 Sep 2026

The Grand River, High After Rain

After three days of September rain I walked the river trail from Harris Nature Center toward downtown and found the Grand River running the color of strong tea, carrying whole branches as if they were straws. Rivers are the only characters in my books I never have to invent. This entry considers the river as a narrative engine — in my own novels and in the Michigan canon — and includes the paragraph of The Orchard at Hollow Creek that I rewrote eleven times to get the water right.

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18 Jun 2026

What Meridian Mall Taught Me About Plot

Walking the long corridor past Schuler Books on a wet Thursday, watching the same dozen walkers making their measured loops before the stores open, I understood something about structure that two decades of craft books had not told me: a plot is not a road but a mall — a covered circuit you walk repeatedly, noticing one new storefront each pass. An essay about re-reading, re-visioning, and why the second draft of Winter Count is a map of the first.

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27 Jan 2026

On Revising in January

January is the cruelest month for a Michigan writer and the kindest for a Michigan editor, and I am both in alternating weeks. When the light fails at five, the only honest thing to do is cut. Notes on a month spent reducing a chapter from forty pages to twelve, on the discipline of the wastebasket, and on Howard Pell's winter tally, which began as a real notebook on my own desk before it became a novel.

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9 Nov 2025

A Field Guide to Library Basements

The basement of the East Lansing Public Library smells of paper and radiator dust and is, I will argue, one of the great rooms of the mid-Michigan literary world. This field guide describes five basement and back-room collections within an hour of Okemos — their light, their chairs, their particular silence — and makes the case that a novelist is largely the sum of the rooms she has been quiet in.

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15 Aug 2025

The Last Typewriter Repair Bench in Lansing

On a side street in Lansing there is still a man who will take apart a 1962 Smith-Corona, lay its pieces on a green felt mat, and put it back together better than the factory did. I brought him the machine my mother typed her own stories on. An essay about repair as a form of reading, and about the sentence that came back to life with the escapement spring.

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About the journal

How these essays are made

Every entry in this journal begins as a walk — usually the loop from the house down to the Red Cedar and back along the river trail — and ends, a few days later, as a typed page pinned to a corkboard above the desk. Nothing here is written to a schedule or a market. When there is nothing worth saying, the journal stays quiet, which in a writing life is also a kind of entry.

Letters about the essays are read with real pleasure and answered in batches, usually on Sunday afternoons. The address is on the contact page.

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A gravel path curving through tall sunlit woodland — The river trail in late light, where most entries begin.