Reporting live from the site of Broward College’s North Regional Library: Activity really picked up in today’s second half. We moved the tables a little closer to the foot traffic. (Not sure why they buried us in the archives. Conspiracies abound!) We asked one bookseller if she could move her sign over. The organizers of…

There’s plenty to do this spring. This year’s wRites of Spring Literary Festival, organized by yours truly, will host visiting author Nicole Dennis-Benn, whose novels, Here Comes the Sun and Patsy, explore how Jamaican culture intersects with issues of class, color, gender, and sexuality. The title of the festival is “A Woman’s Voice: Class, Color,…

Have you ever watched one of those nature documentaries about colorful island birds that organize and reorganize their nests, looking for the perfect design of twig and leaf? They chirp, they flit, they bounce, and they gather until the nest becomes a Platonic form shining in an abstract firmament. Well, that’s me. I don’t seem…

I have stumbled into one of the writing traps that I warn my students against: too much plot for a short story. As my story ideas progressed, it became more and more evident that I could not fit them into short-story form. It’s time to eliminate the excess. This wrong turn put me into a…

I’m working on a few puzzles for my time-travel story to illustrate what a character finds in some typescripts produced by chimpanzees, i.e. the infinite monkey theorem. Although I’ll probably circle the hidden words in my story, I am curious as to whether readers can find the text on their own. A famous literary passage…