It’s been fifty years since I was a law clerk to the Honorable Judge John Minor Wisdom, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. How is it possible that so much time has passed? In many ways, my first post-law-school job seems like it could have…
Moving up in the competition with a Silver Book Award from Literary Titan … Literary Titan Silver Book Award | LITERARY TITAN! Let this be only the first step!
We made it to the long-list~ The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction… See more chantireviews.com The 2025 Somerset Long List for Literary & Contemporary Fiction | Chanticleer The last of the Long Lists are here! It’s Short Lists all the way down after this! Congratulations to these authors who made the…
I won’t let my students use Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) in my Creative Writing class and I won’t use it myself. It’s technically possible to use GAI to “create” something that looks like literature, i.e., an essay, a poem, or story. And a would-be writer can create a prompt and ask (tell?) Chat-GPT to write…
How does a writer learn about main characters? That’s another way of asking how does a writer ensure that these characters are round, meaning interesting and complex and, therefore, completely believable as human beings? I would guess that all writers have different strategies for achieving this effect. One way that works for me is to…
There had to be a first time when I decided to knock on doors on behalf of a political campaign, and today was the day, chilly and cloudy, but not terribly uncomfortable. I volunteered to help the Wexton campaign in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. Naturally, I was early to the meeting in McClean Central Park…
The biggest problem facing democracy in America is apathy: the apathy of people who don’t even want to talk to other people about what our problems are. I encounter this apathy when I canvass for Congressional candidates, something I’ve done a few times over the last month on behalf of a candidate for the Democratic…
The best way to approach issues of faith in a novel – or anywhere else – is to do so with great respect. Yet, try as one might, novels such as these are not for everyone. The imperative of writing any novel is that it must tell a good story, by which I mean one…