Writer Friends: Sara Pritchard
In keeping with my promise to spend this week introducing you to my writer friends, let me present Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots, Lately, and innumerable short stories. I am introducing you to Sara first for a number of reasons; she is a writer whose work I greatly admire, reading her work will make you a better reader, writer, and/or person, and it’s so close to Thanksgiving that a good chunk of my time the last–and next–few days must be devoted to preparing the meal. Thankfully, I can fall back on letting Craig Seligman of the New York Times do a good bit of the introducing for me. From his review of Crackpots:

Writing Friends…
I am lucky enough to have several friends who are accomplished writers. Over the Thanksgiving break, I’m going to be taking a look at some of their works on this blog. But before I start looking at the individual works, I wanted to take a moment to just talk about what it has meant to have these writers as friends. Writing is a lot of work. Some of the work is apparent; it takes place at the keyboard and produces a growing (and then shrinking) number of pages toward a completed work. It is easy, during this part of the process, to say to friends and loved one, “Sorry, I can’t do that right now, I’m working.” Much of the work, though, i

Hallowe’en, Part II
Last year, we had three folk come by dressed as Obama. One of them was a young black boy who lives across the street. He wore a suit and very proudly announced that he was dressed as our next President. It seemed a hopeful thing, and a moment when the world changed at least a tiny bit. This year, his older brother–who is white–ran down the street in a KKK hood made from a white kitchen trash bag singing either Fight the Power or White Power, I could not tell which. He didn’t stop and ask for candy, just made a mad dash down the very center of the street while the younger children in Princess and Transformer costumes brought me the

Hallowe’en
Last year, you may remember that Trick or Treat reached almost epiphanic proportions around here when the most common costume was that of then-candidate, now-President Obama. And the sea change that seemed to foretell has indeed come… whatever your politics, it is true that no one can ever again say, “Oh, the US isn’t ready for a black president.” No black child will ever again grow up believing that to be true. And if you think that, in and of itself, isn’t something to celebrate… if you can’t put aside the politics of the thing long enough to be glad for that… well, you might want to ask yourself some difficult questions abo

Back to Blogging…
There are several really good reasons to stop blogging. It bores you. It bores other people. It interferes with your cocktail hour. You fail to let it interfere with your cocktail hour and accidentally post the one thing you promised your mother you would never, ever write about. Or, you start teaching Freshman Composition. Here is the thing about teaching Freshman Comp. The students–who cannot themselves spell, use punctuation correctly, or write a thesis statement–have the uncanny ability to identiy every little grammatical error and rhetorical flaw in an instructor’s blog. They will print out blog posts and bring them to cl