Years ago, when I was a young and struggling single mother of two small children, a friend gave me a cassette tape of Zig Ziglar talking about goal setting. My friend Gary thought it would help me focus on finishing my undergraduate degree and making a better life for myself and my family. It took me weeks of my friend calling to see if I'd listened to the tape for me to finally put it in the car's cassette player one morning on the way to work, just so I could say, "Yes, Gary! I listened to it!" That tape changed my life. I listened to the tape periodically through finishing my degree and growing my business, a cleaning service. I wore the tape out and had to buy another one. The thing that triggered my focus and honed my determination was this. Zig Ziglar asked, "Do you want to be a wondering generality, or a meaningful specific?" That question still has an impact on the way I live my life, and I still listen to Zig. That question has also had an impact on my writing and my teaching. I realized whenI began teaching creative writing that I was teaching people how to write about and with meaningful specifics.

My teaching is rooted in four basic principles: 1) good fiction, memoir, and even narrative poetry come from character development through the use of meaningful specifics that reveal people, place, action, choices, and a way of seeing, 2) Faulkner's statement that fiction comes from experience, observation, and imagination, 3) that you learn what your story, novel, or poem is about by writing the 1st draft, what I call the learning draft-and you get that draft through short assignments and a willingness to write badly, and 4) reading good writing is ultimately the writer's best teacher.

I have had some amazing teachers in my life. When it comes to writing, novelist and teacher Lee Smith and nonfiction writer and professor of English Lucinda MacKethan, have been my best teaching role models because they love to teach, and they love meeting a student where they are and working with the student's writing and research desire. Like Smith and MacKethan, I love teaching creative writing because I want my interest and enthusiasm to be contagious. My favorite classroom is a continuing education venue full of adults with careers other than writing. Their experience and history gives them a well of material to draw from and often a level of empathy and compassion so necessary for any good writer.

Along with teaching at residential workshops, writers' conferences, and in university continuing studies programs, I have held writing classes in a library, a cheese shop, the storage room of a bookstore, a law firm's conference room, a bank board room, a student's living room, a court house, a student's dinning room, a bonus room over a garage, a vacation beach house, my own living room, and a café. When people ask me where I teach, I often say I teach out of my truck. Because so much of my teaching in recent years has been dependent on offered space and word of mouth, a student once referred to me as the Mary Kay of Fiction. In these less-than-conventional classrooms I have heard fantastic stories, true and not true, and have been privileged to read some excellent writing by folks who have always wanted to write fiction, poetry, or memoir, but who, like me, had to do some other things first.

I also teach in a few venues for teenage writers, particularly the Tennessee Young Writers Workshop. I am continually amazed at the strong talent and rich material these younger writers bring to the table. I'm impressed by their hard work, dedication to improving their craft, and the generosity they afford one another as they learn to take risks as writers.

Updates from participants in my workshops and classes are welcome. Some of my students have gone on to attend the Sewanee Writers Workshop, and MFA programs, and some have published in magazines and journals. A few now have agents and published books to their credit. None of that is my doing, but sometimes taking a workshop that helps you focus on some specific, basic principles of writing can give a writer just the right key to turn the lock on what seems like an illusive goal, or set of goals, in a pursuit of an avocation or vocation that requires so much solitude, self-direction, and self-nurture.

At present, my time for teaching ongoing classes and coaching individual writers is curtailed while I work diligently on several writing projects of my own. I still find time, however, to teach or speak at sort-term workshops and conferences as my schedule allows. If you are interested in inviting me to speak or teach at your event, contact me, and I will be happy to check my availability. Meanwhile, you'll find a monthly mini lesson on this website.