Writing for Radio: Put Out Your Eyes
Forget what you know about writing. Forget computer screens and words on the page. Forget about your eyes. Radio is all about the ears. You’re writing not to be read but to be heard. View pdf
May 2007
Darkness
Runner's World, October 2006
it’s 5 a.m. and black as pitch. i shuffle down the asphalt toward the gravel road, the whites of my running shoes flashing like eyes. There are a few houses along the way. In one lamplighted window, a figure sits hunched over
a table. Eating? Examining plane tickets?
Walk on the Wild Side
We leave Middlebury before dawn, nudging our twin beams of light across the Champlain Bridge and onto New York Rt. 9N. Not long after crossing into the Adirondack Park, a large coyote lopes across the road, silver and blond fur glinting in our headlights, eyes shining like coins. March 2006
Urgent Conversations at 5 a.m.
It’s 5 a.m. and black as pitch. I shuffle down the hard asphalt toward the gravel road. All I can see are the whites of my running shoes, flashing like eyes. I follow their every move. Winner: 2005 Ralph Nading Hill Jr. Literary Prize
Afterlife
People at work consider me pretty quiet, a little shy maybe. I know the ribbing is good-natured, meant to loosen me up. But I’ve been through this before – in newsrooms as a reporter, in college seminars, at family gatherings. And I suppose I can be a bit self-conscious and taciturn, distant even. Except for that ten-year period when I was a raging drunk who degraded girlfriends and answered to the name “Asshole.” But it’s hard to work that into a snappy comeback. So I just keep my eyes down on my traffic report. March 2005
Notes from the Back Row
When scanning the alumni notes section in this magazine, I can choose from two classes. I graduated the University of Vermont in 1994 but finished high school in 1988. I joke about the math, the six- year plan and all that. But it doesn’t really matter. I don’t recognize the bold-faced names leaping about the nostalgic print of either column. And they surely wouldn’t know me. During much of my UVM tenure, I tried to stay anonymous, unknowable. Fall 2003
Requiem for a Jam Band
It was perhaps Burlington’s most famous birth. Phish. Midwived in large part by UVM dorms and buildings, the foursome slipped from the city in the mid-1980s, each band member a native son, none a Vermonter. Fall 04