The woman sitting in the coffee shop opposite me had once been my English student.  She’s in her seventies now and I am halfway through my eighties.  From time to time, she assists me with some of my writing projects. Recently, she did a final edit of my memoir which I began in 20

While sitting with a guest for tea at the retirement center, a gentleman, to whom I’d never spoken, paused by our table.  “You’re the writer, aren’t you?”  As I strive to be one,  I nodded. “ Well, I wanted to tell you about the greatest opening to a novel I’ve ever r

Writer Geoff Dyer recounts a lunch where George Orwell’s wife, Sonia, and her husband’s biographer, Bernard Crick, almost came to blows over whether the famous writer did or didn’t shoot an elephant in Burma. (Nothing But,” by Geoff Dyer, Harper’s, May 2018, pgs. 73-74.)  A

I have in my mind an idea for a short memoir about my three-and-a- half years abroad.  During that time, I taught everything from biology to the American Revolution in English schools, one in the Midlands and the other in Essex. Holidays brimmed with foreign adventure until I cam