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It's easy to make people cry. Bald chemo kid in a hospital bed, mangy dog in the pound, soldier on the tarmac home from war greeting his family — who doesn't get teary-eyed? I routinely cry at phone commercials in which people call their mothers.

But it's much more difficult to make people laugh, which is precisely why I so admire comedy.

By comedy I don't mean the broadest slapstick, slips on banana peels and goofy hats. I mean comedy that is challenging, potentially even offensive.

We're more used to that kind of humor in TV and movies. People revel in political incorrectness from Larry David and Sacha Baron Cohen. Quentin Tarantino has made a career out of chuckling at death, the more grotesque the better. But literary fiction with comic overtones has a harder time finding its audience. Serious fiction still tends to be mostly... serious.

My favorite works of fiction are dark (as opposed to lite?) comedies that tiptoe a tonal tightrope. Vladimir Nabokov yucked it up about the grooming habits of sexual predators in Lolita. Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a laugh riot about, among ...

When it happens, it feels like winning the lottery. An email arrives out of the blue, from one of my publishers or a festival director or a member of a festival's staff: Would I like to come to a festival? In Canada, in Australia, in France? The answer is always yes because, the obvious pleasures of traveling to these places aside, this is what they're offering: a week, sometimes longer, when I don't have to be anything but a writer.

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It probably goes without saying by now that this is not a glamorous life. There are glamorous moments, but they cause a certain psychic whiplash because they're followed so rapidly by non-glamour. The most glamorous photo of me ever taken, for example, was at a charity ball in Toronto in 2010 or 2011, shot for one of those "here are pictures of people at a fancy event!" pages in one of Canada's national newspapers. In the photograph I am smiling in a long silk gown, identified by profession and by my first and middle names. ("Author Emily St. John." In all fairness, my ...

I'd predict that 99 percent of the small talk in the staff elevator at my library involves the following question and its answers:

"Are you reading anything good?"

Most recently I asked this of a woman holding The Poisonwood Bible, which I adored.

"Yes!" she said, waving the book in front of me. "I'm almost done. This book has changed my life."

Hearing that a book changed someone's life is one of my greatest pleasures. I can't think of a better compliment an author could hear. Unfortunately, my follow-up question doesn't always yield a satisfying answer:

"How?" I said. Meaning, how did it change your life?

"Because it was amazing!" she said.

This is a pretty typical response, and I know I do it sometimes as well.

"Because it was just so good!"

"It was incredible!"

"I loved it!"

These are all great to hear, but none of them indicate any clues about how a life might have been changed, not that anyone owes me an explanation if I ask. Still, "This changed my life!" is pretty high praise and shouldn't be interchangeable with "This book is ...

Note: Rachel Roellke Coddington and Jolby will present their book at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing on Wednesday, May 15, at 7:00 p.m.

Greetings, adventurers! As you travel the evergreen roadways of the Pacific Northwest, you may find yourself in contact with many intriguing monsters. Let our book, Monsters under Bridges, be a guide as you explore the bridges of the region in your travels (or in your mind!). From Vancouver, Washington, to the beaches of Oregon, these monsters deserve your attention — and love. Why? Let's find out.

5. Monsters aren't all... you know, monsters.
We've been trained to identify monsters as a negative part of the world. They are typically a beast or creature causing significant discomfort to humans. The word "monster" itself brings into the mind images of gnashing teeth, rippling muscle-bound fur, and Charlize Theron with no makeup. Some more modern tales — Shrek, Sesame Street, and, of course, Monsters, Inc. — shed a more accurate light onto the world of monsters and what they do for humans. Your first task as a monster lover is to shake off those chains of generational prejudice and ...

Chefs don't have time to write. While I was working on Smoke and Pickles, I was running a restaurant — a daily regimen of testing recipes, arguing with purveyors, and greeting guests that left little time for introspection. I wrote nights mostly, battling fatigue and the impending noise of sunrise. During the day, I gravitated to tasks so deeply ingrained in the muscle-memory of my hands that I could let my brain focus on my book . The most Zen-like of these tasks was clarifying butter.

As a young chef in New York, I worked for a French guy who insisted I make clarified butter from scratch every morning. As a result, I find few things in life as peaceful as the steady, repetitive motion of that task. I can do it for hours, a hundred pounds' worth, all the while organizing an essay in my head, oblivious to the passing of time. Toward the end of writing my book, I felt like I couldn't finish a chapter without clarifying butter. It resulted in a book I'm proud of — and more clarified butter than even my restaurants could ...

They have been on the move for the past half-year or so now, starting from their longtime home in the downstairs closet, on to my desk, then to my office floor, upstairs into another closet, back down next to my desk, then back upstairs. I am supposed to get rid of them; Amy almost has more than once. But so far, I have not been able to. Just when I feel I'm ready to immortalize them in picture, and maybe words, one final time before parting, something comes up and back they go. It's not like I can't let them go, or won't — I will. I just haven't yet. Part of it is procrastination, yes, but part of it, I know, is reluctance to let go, broken down and nearly lifeless as they are now.

These are my Montrail Moraines, the first pair of real hiking boots I ever owned in the Pacific Northwest. Before picking these up, I was scraping by with an old pair of Doc Martens patched on the soles with rubber cement. A picture from 16 years ago shows Amy and me relishing the chill wind and incredible view over Lake Tahoe from atop Mount Tallac, ...

Every night after I finish work, I sit down to write this essay, and every night I fail. And failure, believe it or not, is one of the best things that can happen to a writer . Trying to write and then coming up short is all part of the process. It means that the writing hasn't measured up. It means the work can be better and this goal of something better is what's important.

One of the best tips I've received on talking about my work is to give the reader something they cannot find in the pages of my novels. So let's start there. I failed myself when I started down the path to what would become my second novel, The Carrion Birds. I had false starts. I had scenes that didn't go anywhere, characters that didn't seem real enough, even 20,000-word sections that didn't measure up. So I held onto it, believing the good writing — the writing The Carrion Birds deserved — would come.

For a long time I struggled over this essay because what I was writing didn't seem like something from my own ...

A long time ago, when I was in graduate school, I joined a writers' group. It was an informal workshop in which we intended to help each other finish and improve works of fiction then in progress. It didn't last long. If I'm perfectly honest, it was a washout. I know writers who swear by such groups, thank theirs in the acknowledgements in their books, and advise new or struggling writers to find one of their own. I've no doubt that a good one, one with the right chemistry, is a fantastic support system and resource.

This one I joined, it was not that.

It wasn't that we didn't have good intentions; there was a lot of loyalty, critical admiration, and genuine fondness in the room, and — because there were human beings there — there was also a lot of insecurity. Every last one of us was eager to get and give help with our writing problems, but none of us really wanted to hear, or speak aloud, anything that might hurt. We quickly gravitated to talking only about one another's best ...

This is the story of how I became a writer, which is also the story of how I became a tabletop gamer.

It starts around when I entered high school. I'd always been a geek, but before high school my preferred outlet was reading fantasy and science fiction, with a leavening of video games. (This was in the dark ages of 1995 or thereabouts, so that meant saving up for SNES cartridges.) I was the kid who spent his time reading through the public library's entire sci-fi collection (even the series where they'd lost half the books, so I had to guess at the plot) and stayed up until dawn finishing Final Fantasy VI. But these games rarely involved other people, unless you counted sometimes having to fight my brother for the TV.

That changed in high school, when I joined a role-playing group. "Joined," in this context, is actually the wrong word; "was abducted by" is possibly a little more accurate. This group (led by my friend Luke) was extremely aggressive in its recruiting, I suspect because they had discovered that the people ...

I was being driven up some steep gravel roads in a pickup truck, above Paradise Valley, in Montana. This was back in 2007. Below, the Yellowstone River snaked back and forth, Highway 89 running parallel. The driver of the truck was a man I'd just met, a friend of a friend; somewhat taciturn, he didn't seem to know what to make of me. He seemed suspicious of my interest in where he'd agreed to take me.

Seventeen years before, this man and several thousand other people were members of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a sect led by the Messenger Elizabeth Clare Prophet. With the help of the Ascended Masters, a group of deities who spoke through her, the Messenger had proclaimed the late '80s a particularly dangerous time. Preparations would have to be made, for it seemed quite possible that the world might end.

The landscape around us showed those preparations. Here and there, the ground had caved in on what had been shelters for families or groups of families. Steel doorways were cut into the sides of cliffs. The ground rose up in rounded, paranoid humps, and ...