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Writing is running away or — wait — writing is like running away. Okay, I'm too busy escaping through the door to be sure which.

The compulsion to run has always been with me, as natural as picking scabs and torturing little brothers. I still fight the impulse daily. Sit down at the desk. Do not move. DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR. Much as Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream plots to whisk Hermia to his Aunt's house on the outskirts of Athens, I too am on the permanent look out for a bolt-hole.

Know of any nice houses on a Greek island I can borrow?

I could try changing my name to Adrasteia which means "not inclined to run away," but it also has the mirror-meaning of "inescapable," and there is the paradox of writing: all stories are a form of running away, but getting there — to run with the story, to venture far into invented, fabricated territories — can only be done whilst sitting still. True, you might walk or cycle or swim as you imagine your ...

It should not be so hard to write both poetry and fiction. Both arts, after all, make use of the same materials, words and punctuation. Poems frequently utilize the strategies of fiction, which in turn, in the hands of the best writers, listens carefully to the sounds that it is making. Even poems which do not tell a story contain descriptions of people or settings, and all poems have to figure out how to handle time, which is usually the tallest obstacle that stories also have to hurdle.

And yet few writers have been officially crowned in both genres — just Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence come unequivocally to mind. In my high school in the 1970s, we read Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar, but the critical consensus has come to be that Plath's novel lacks the maturity of her poems — even Plath dismissed the novel as a potboiler — and it is not now given equal footing in the canon. Prolific novelists, such as John Updike and Margaret Atwood, ...

When I set out to write a book about the natural history of breasts, I knew I'd have to answer some awkward questions about my book topic. At a friend's book party, I entered a discussion with an elderly man who is slightly hard of hearing.

"What's your book about?" he politely asked.

"Breasts," I ventured.

"What's that?"

"Breasts," I said louder. Some people turned to look at me.

"What? Death?"

"No, breasts!" By this time I was shouting and gesturing in an unmistakable way.

You get the idea.

Within my awkward topic of breasts, it soon became clear I'd have to tackle the awkward question of evolution. How did these wonders appear? At first, I thought this would be relatively straightforward. I figured that if all mammals had them, how complicated could it be? But this turned out to be one of the most contentious discussions in a book full of them. I soon learned that human breasts, in all their fatty, pendulous glory, are incredibly unique in the animal kingdom. Other primates have swollen mounds while lactating, but ours show up in puberty and stick around regardless of our lactational status.

Now, ...

It happens every year on the day after the Grammys, the VMAs, or the American Music Awards; Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites unite in one common refrain: we wish Taylor Swift would just stop faking it.

Taylor Swift has won dozens of awards, so we've witnessed this scene dozens of times. The nominees are announced, and the camera spins through several women's faces until it locks in on Taylor Swift and her dazzling eyes, her flawless skin, and her expression that seems to say, "Was that my name I just heard?" And then the inevitable happens; she's announced as the winner, she gasps in surprise, she staggers to the stage, and "OMG! OMG!" etc.

We find ourselves wondering how, as a young woman whose experienced unimaginable success at such an early age, Taylor Swift can be so consistently blown away by winning awards. I like to think I'm not a cynical person, so maybe she's surprised that the announcer didn't call out "Taylor Hicks" by accident, or perhaps she's buying time in case Kanye West takes the stage to say a few words in refute before ...

In 1965 my father became president of the community college in a mid-sized town in eastern North Carolina. The local newspaper ran an article announcing the arrival of the new president and his family, the piece accompanied by an achingly sincere black-and-white photo that showed us to be models of Cold War propriety. There was my father in his dark suit, skinny tie, and black-frame glasses, my pretty mother with her hair in a flawless bouffant, and my three sisters and I, the four of us kids staring into the camera with varying degrees of poise and cluelessness. We ranged in age from my oldest sister St., who was 13 at the time, to my next sister C, nine years old, then myself, seven, and finally my youngest sister S, aged one. We lived in a big red brick house at the corner of Fairfield and Waverly Avenues, belonged to the country club and the First Presbyterian Church, and held ourselves to the strictest standards of law-abiding citizens in the mid-century America of the New South. My parents were hardworking pillars of the community; we, their ...

When they ask about my debut novel, Glow, people often want to know why I set it in the mountains and forests of Georgia. In Glow, ghosts inhabit the landscape just as easily as living beings, the two sometimes being interchangeable. When I began writing the story, I knew I needed an environment that could support and evoke that. I needed a forest.

As a child growing up in New York City, I found the forest a distant and alien place filled with slithering reptiles, crafty quadrupeds, drunken teenagers, and witches. As I erupted into adulthood, my concept did not change much. Simply put, I am no outdoorswoman. That is not to say I don't enjoy sipping a warm beverage at an outdoor café (preferably in Paris) or drifting in the clear blue waters of my grandfather's native Gaeta or zipping along the Hudson River at sunset with a friend. Oh, how I do! And if adventure includes coursing down the Amazon in a hundred-foot-long wooden boat or soaring into the sky in a 1929 biplane, I have been adventurous. But the Amazon trip was with ...

Perhaps you are aware of the fact that there is an oddly popular trivia game floating around that a group of clever (and likely bored) college students invented back in the early 1990s called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Maybe you have even played it. Taking its name from the social-networking concept of six degrees of separation, the idea is to link any given film celebrity to the actor Kevin Bacon within six steps or less. Accordingly, the lower a player's "Bacon" number, the better.

With Glen Campbell the recent and highly deserving recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award, I would now like to change the rules of the game a little bit for purposes of this essay. From this moment forward, it shall be officially known as Six Degrees of Glen Campbell. Further, the goal will be to link Campbell, not Kevin Bacon, in six steps or less to Powell's City of Books.

Got it? Okay, good! Let's give it a whirl.

Now, of course, it would be taking the easy way out to just say that, hey, Glen Campbell has a long-out-of-print autobiography on Powell's ...

Writing about God poses a particular challenge for an author. Besides the ever-present risk of offending someone, or everyone, lurks a more fundamental problem: there is nothing to say. The great spiritual masters of centuries past — people way more enlightened than I'll ever be — knew this. "Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of him is untrue," observed the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, some 500 years ago. God is ineffable, beyond words.

Yet I am a writer. Words are all I have. So I ignore Meister Eckhart's warning, and I prate.

Immediately, I sensed trouble. Tell people you are writing a book about happiness, the subject of my previous project, and their eyes light up. Tell people you are writing a book about God and their eyes dart about, looking for the nearest exit.

I can't blame them. I was treading on treacherous ground. Good writing is honest writing, but honest writing also carries with it the greatest possibility of causing offense. Which is fine if you are offending someone's favorite sports team or cartoon character, but what if you're offending their heritage? What if — and this gets to the heart ...

There is a debut novel out this fall that has been getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately, I didn't write it. Following its excerpting in Sports Illustrated and being the subject of a 10,000-(or-so)-word profile in Vanity Fair, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding became a national bestseller in the first week of its release. Prior to all of this, The Art of Fielding spawned the funniest headline not written for the Onion when Bloomberg reported on the sale of the book to publishers by saying, "Unemployed Harvard Man Sells Novel for $650,000."

The cynic would say that all the subsequent attention for Harbach's novel is driven by that very large number (which was actually $665,000), except that if the cynic has actually read the book (as I have), he'd realize that The Art of Fielding is completely charming from the first word to the last, somehow combining a baseball book with a campus novel, all the while mixing in two significant love stories and a buddy comedy. I read it in a day six weeks ...

Hello, Portland! I suck. I won't be coming there on this book tour.

Believe me; this hurts me as much as it does you. I love Portland. I tell everyone who would know what I'm talking about that I actually met David McCullough and his wife in my hotel on second-to-last trip there. First I thought, that's a very handsome elderly gentleman, and then I thought, I know that voice! (My Spouse-Creature and I have only watched Ken Burns's The Civil War, which McCullough narrates, about six times.) Mr. McCullough and I introduced ourselves in the elevator, and learned both of us were there on book tour (him for 1776). I got to tell him that his The Johnstown Flood was one of my favorite books, and he and his equally lovely wife took down my name to see if their grandkids would like my stuff. How cool is that? David McCullough is one of our most distinguished historians, and my favorite along with Shelby Foote (The Civil War) and John Keegan (Continue »