December is here, and it’s a big month for me. Obviously, the holiday season is here, which means lots of Advent activities, followed by Christmas and the New Year. My grandfather is coming for a visit, followed soon thereafter by my mom and step-father. The three of them will be snow-birding here in Florida this year, so we’ll get to see them a lot. December also marks my birthday (one of the BIG ones) and my wedding anniversary (which are all BIG ones) and lots of opportuni

Over the next few days (with a break for the Thanksgiving holiday, naturally) I’ve asked some of my favorite writer friends to help out by providing their reactions to one of my favorite short stories: Flannery O’Connor’s, A Good Man is Hard to Find. It’s a story that deserves to be read and re-read, and studied thoroughly. It is a story I assign to my fiction writing students and I can’t wait to read the responses to the story from these wonderful writers. I’m pretty sure yo

<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-903" class="size-full wp-image-903 lazyload" title="ph30" src="https://ericswyatt.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/ph30.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="187" /> A photo taken from the Brush Creek Foundation website. Tuesday morning (very, very early, as Cami will tell you) I will head off to the Brush Creek Ranch, near Saratoga, Wyoming (via Denver and Laramie). I’ll be one of seven or eight other artists (two writers, two musicians, and fo

I have an affinity for geographically-centered fiction. What I mean is, I think the “place” of the writer and the story he writes are very important to the writing, even if the place only serves as background and research for the writer. On Twitter recently, I stumbled across a relatively new literary magazine called Midwestern Gothic, with a focus on stories, poems, and photography that highlight the midwest. Midwestern Gothic (ISSN 2159-8827) is a quarterly print literary j