My second piece for Earshot Jazz was published April 1. It's a profile of a saxophonist living in Spokane. Click here to read it.

Beginning My Blog

I set up a blog a year ago with the intent of commenting on my musical works in progress. With all my focus on the music, I never posted anything.

Now that I'm writing, I invite you to visit my first posting at http://stevegriggsmusic.blogspot.com/

-Steve

Food Writing by John McPhee

John McPhee's 1979 book Giving Good Weight includes "Brigade de Cuisine," a piece about a chef and his wife. I particularly liked this sentence:

"The dacquoise resembles cake and puts up a slight crunchy resistance before it effects a melting disappearance between tongue and palate and a swift transduction through the bloodstream to alight in the brain as a poem."

Anyone hungry?

The Peculiar Qualities of English

"To write English well, it is generally agreed, is not to imitate, but to evolve a style peculiarly suited to one's own temperament, environment and purposes."

"No writer should fail to reckon with modern reading habits."

"It is not that modern people are less intelligent than their grandparents: only that, being busier, they are less careful."

"Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering as they read."

"We do not suggest that writers should indulge busy readers by writing down to them--giving them nothing but short messages simply phrased; but only that sentences and paragraphs should follow one another so easily and inevitably, and with such economy of phrase, that a reader will have no encouragement to skip."

-Robert Graves & Alan Hodge in The Reader Over Your Shoulder

Scott Russell Sanders on Essays

"For me the writing of a personal essay is like finding my way through a forest without being quite sure what game I am chasing, what landmark I am seeking. I sniff down one path until some heady smell tugs me in a new direction, and then off I go, dodging and circling, lured on by the calls of unfamiliar birds, puzzled by the tracks of strange beasts, leaping from stone to stone across rivers, barking up one tree after another. The pleasure in writing an essay--and, when the writing is any good, the pleasure of reading it--comes from this dodging and leaping, this movement of the mind.
"It must not be idle movement, however, if the essay is to hold up; it must yield a pattern, draw a map of experience, be driven by deep concerns. The surface of a river is alive with lights and reflections, the breaking of foam over rocks, but underneath that dazzle it is going somewhere. We should expect as much from an essay: the shimmer and play of mind on the surface and in the depths a strong current." - Scott Russell Sanders in Introduction to The Paradise of Bombs

John McPhee on Leads

Here are 2 brief articles on writing leads by John McPhee.

Story Lab

Writing a Strong Lead is Half the Battle

-Steve Griggs