If you’re new to this blog, let me give you a heads-up: this is the monthly post in which I bore most of you silly by writing about an essayist that I’ve been reading. I’m calling the project My Year of Excellent Essayists, and you can read more about it here. random notes: I have [...]

If your kid loves Wolverine, go with it. Find the comics at the library; buy some for his birthday. When trying to choose a gift to make for that birthday, decide on a freezer paper applique of “young” Wolverine. Trace the outline from a comic when he isn’t looking. Do not swear when you cut [...]

I gave my Nurturing Young Writers workshop to a small group of homeschoolers the other night. Part of the workshop is a quick exercise, which, judging from the reaction it gets, is effective. The following is a snippet from a book chapter I’m working on, explaining what I ask them to do.       Participants [...]

For years I’ve struggled with the term unschooling. It’s such a great word, implying a complete departure from school. To me, it conveys a sense of kids leading their own educations, which is something we value around here. But it’s also come to imply, it seems, a certain lack of structure, and that’s the part [...]

random notes: This has been a tough month for my essayist project. I’ve told you how I got distracted reading Spunk & Bite. I also have a seventeen-year-old applying to college this fall, so I’m suddenly busy with that, and reading books with ridiculous titles like How to Get Into the Top Colleges.  I seemed to [...]

Last week Molly and I were talking blog posts. She asked if I ever worried, when writing my essayists posts, that the writers might visit my blog and read what I’d written. She said she’d once written about a craft book, and the author had shown up and commented on it. (Luckily, what she’d written [...]