Being abroad with twelve other people is amazing. It forces you make friends in way you usually don’t: being trapped together. This trip had an extra twist: we got to write together too. But I don’t want to was […]

I like to consider myself as someone who does not have many fears. Yes there are some things I am genuinely terrified of, but other things that make me uneasy or on edge I like to try and overcome. Horses have […]

A warehouse of stone and metal houses a collection of historical value oft overlooked.  Filing cabinets extend along the length of the one-room library in fourteen rows, not counting those running along the outer […]

Rubbing tired eyes, I move though my apartment after a long night’s rest. While sunlight warms my back,  I turn to pour cereal into a bowl when I hear an announcement come over the news. “For those just tuning it […]

Maria drove the Durango across the rocky Icelandic plain toward the mountain in the distance. She inspected it through her windshield as she approached.  It wasn’t especially large, but its top was unusually fl […]

Over the course of our three weeks in Iceland, we had countless discussions about what makes good writing as we sat in untraditional “classrooms” covered in moss and rock. One of the topics that we touched on frequently is that effective creative writing includes some sort of transformation. In order to engage a reader, there must be a change or…

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New Oxford American Dictionary:
Write: (no obj.) have the ability to mark down coherent letter or words.
Writing and words have a strong association, being that writing is made up of words thrown together to […]

One thing I have been grappling with here in Iceland is the appropriate use of abstract reflections.  In a landscape as dramatic and uniquely beautiful as this, I feel it is very easy to write strictly in terms of concretes.  What there is to see, what has happened, etc.  The landscape itself practically begs to be written about.

However, mi…[Read more]

The Republican National Convention has been underway for four days now.

I had to Google that. I set out to write a fairly BS’d post about the chaos of American politics and how it relates to the chaos of other countries’ politics and then tie it all together in some really deep and meaningful way and thought that would have been a decent…[Read more]

Sometimes you just need to get out there.

Especially when you’ve spent the last four months in a writer’s block-induced fury. You wrestle with the typical writer’s struggle–the need to constantly improve–and […]

In twenty-four hours I went from swimming in a pool, to walking on a glacier.  In twenty-four hours I went from wearing a tank top and thin sweater shirt to three layers and a winter-time beanie. Within two hours […]

To me, it would seem that current events have been especially grim as of late.  Life has taken on an uneasy undertone as the frequency of mass shootings committed in America reaches an all-time high, and the po […]

Within the broadly-defined practice of creative writing exist many distinct disciplines.  One such discipline, formally known as creative nonfiction, focuses on the recollection of that which we as writers have experienced in our own lives.  As a writer who has much more luck putting his own life into words than bringing the words themselves to li…[Read more]

Five minutes into writing for this prompt, and I’m thinking about fish tanks instead of place. So let’s talk about fish tanks. Wikipedia, the origin for most of my CNF inspiration, prefers to call fish tanks aqu […]

 
     When I think about writing and place, I think about a change in place. Some of the times when I have been most inspired to write were when I was experiencing a new place. Our surroundings have a signi […]

Place carries a strong influential factor with it. The context of a place can change the decisions we make about many aspects of our daily life. Consider the two images above, each place […]

Place is typically defined as a point or position in space. Obviously, place is all around us. It is the backdrop of our existence. So if place expands infinitely and connects each of us, what separates this place […]