Last week, I wrote about essays, and how they differed from short stories. I brought all this up because I’ve recently judged for several contests involving both essays and short stories, and sometimes the entries simply weren’t  appropriate. A few of the essays had either no real connection to the subject of the contest, or […]

I had a friend a few decades ago who spurned fiction.  He claimed he didn’t need to read things that were made up – that life contained enough drama. Besides, he declared, only in the reading of non-fiction can we learn from our errors and discover ways to make change. As a writer of fiction, […]