Self-doubt can be a writer’s best friend or mortal enemy. It all depends on how one directs the inner uncertainty that is the constant companion of every wordsmith who puts pen to paper for a living.
About a year before the summer of ice cream began, my father called Tayo and me into the living room and told us that he would be leaving his job at the Kodak plant in Salt Lake City. He asked us to sit on the couch and he sat down next to...
Letters of Note, a five-year-old blog run by Shaun Usher, is now a book. The blog offers correspondence “deserving of a wider audience” (as its tagline runs). When possible, Usher’s blog presents the letters in their original scans...
I was thirty-four years old when I met Léon Descoteaux, the famous tennis player, and stayed for a few days at his home in France, where he lived with his wife and children.
The summer after my first year in college, I worked in a paint factory. Packard Paint was a small operation—no more than thirty people worked there—tucked away in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city of about thirty thousand.
