I read and loved this book back in January. Months later, I still have the book next to my bed and reread the stories often. Searching through old files on my computer, I came across these impressions I wrote down when I first read each story. Notes on Deesha Philyaw’s “The Secret Lives of Church …

See also: Mini-essays on chapters 1-2 and chapters 3-4. In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp talks about the “spine” of a work — not the inspiration, which could be a story or image that sparked the initial idea, and not the theme. But the underlying story you started out wanting to tell, no matter how …

Here’s my mini-essay on the first two chapters. Chapter 3 starts with the Vogon ships gliding unnoticed toward Earth, zoomed way out into space. “On this particular Thursday, something was moving quietly through the ionosphere many miles above the surface of the planet; several somethings in fact, several dozen huge yellow chunky slablike somethings, huge …

In which I spend 14 or so days reading sections of one of my all-time favorite books, Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and trying to understand how he wrote it. Nothing about Arthur is actually funny or appealing, which I imagine is intentional. There’s so much weirdness around that Arthur’s slight resistance …

I had a literary discussion with my 8-year old and it was awesome. A few days ago, I asked for his feedback on a short story that I’m about to submit to Spider Magazine for 6-9 year olds. I read the story out loud to him while he held both arms out to show how …

Matt Haig’s “How to Stop Time” has a premise I can’t stop thinking about, but is marred by a whiny, self-absorbed main character. Haig has a great idea: what if there were a condition that caused people to age so slowly that they live for hundreds of years? There is a real medical condition called …

Today I went down a little Internet rabbit hole and learned about Louis Sachar. It started when a friend said, which made sense in context, “Fine, then he can look at a monkey.” I said, “Wasn’t there somebody in the Wayside School books who yelled something like, ‘TOUCH A MONKEY’?” She didn’t know. A little …

I tried to tell Young Kid the story of Snow White. But I was missing some key plot points: 1.Why does Snow White fall asleep instead of dying? 2. How long does she stay asleep? 3. Doesn’t a prince kiss her awake? But then where do the dwarves come in? 4. How does it end? …