Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Peter Turchi.
Nearly twenty years ago, when I became director of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, I moved into a small office that had been left neat and nearly empty by the previous director. [...]

Editor’s note: As part of our focus on teaching this month, we’re delighted to present this guest post by Richard Goodman.
When a writer publishes a book about writing, I’m often excited to read it.  Especially if it’s by a writer whom I admire.  He or she has been in the trenches, encountered problems and, more [...]

e’re writers! We’re creative souls! We love original thought! But for some reason, we also love lists of rules—especially rules that tell us how to write (and how not to write). Call it one of life’s great paradoxes.
The most widely disseminated list is probably Elmore Leonard’s rather prescriptive catalogue [...]

In The Atlantic’s 2010 Fiction issue, Richard Bausch makes a powerful argument against writing manuals:

Now, I’m not speaking about books dealing with the aesthetics of the task, or with essays about the craft and critical analysis of examples of it—and we have several very fine volumes in that vein (Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House [...]