Although I majored in journalism, I spent much of my college career honing my writing skills under the guidance of the university's writer-in-residence, a wonderfully gifted novelist. He required not only that I dedicate hours each week to intensive writing exercises, but that I regularly read great writers: James Joyce, Thomas Hardy, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner and more. He had me focus on writing short stories, explorations of a single idea in the space of a few pages. Under his tutelage, short stories became poems in prose. The words flowed rathe more...
