Welcome to my blog!

I just returned from the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, which is held every two years in Dayton, Ohio. It was my first year attending the conference, and I had a great time. My highlights:

1. I got to meet Garrison Keillor, Mike Peters, and a host of other great humorists.

2. There were some really good workshop leaders who gave me a lot of useful information.

3. Thanks to Gordon Kirkland, I did a standup comedy routine on Saturday night. I was nervous as a cat all day, but had a blast once I took the stage!

On Sunday, I took an extra day and drove down to Columbus to visit the James Thurber House and Museum. I was treated to the full service guided tour (for a whopping $2.50) by a lovely man named Ellison. Thurber was the first humor essayist I ever read, and I wore out the library copy of The Thurber Carnival.

I knew of his early struggles, that his brother accidentally shot him with an arrow and blinded him in one eye, not that his vision was ever stellar. However, seeing pictures of him in the home where much of his My Life and Hard Times was written, the setting for The Night the Bed Fell on My Father, drove home how extraordinary the man was. The picture of him, wearing his magnifying binoculars and leaning into a canvas the size of the Chrysler Building, trying to draw a cartoon, showed creative energy at its most willful, a force that refused to be ignored. 

I'll never see my writing as difficult again.