Steve’s Blog

Steve’s Blog

Writing is a powerful tool to greater self-understanding, but it’s a lot more than that: It’s a way of life. In founding the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods in 2013, Steve and Sarah were drawn to the challenge of taking the inspiring calm and natural beauty of their little swath of land at the end of Amigo Road and sharing that with visitors to help them energize their lives. The hope was that others could leave feeling a little closer to nature – and to themselves – and carry that feeling forward. In his regular blog, Steve explores the mysteries of writing, and of inspiring other writers, and he also delves into the delicate balance required to think less and feel more, to be excited by life but not let stress or time sickness poison our sense of the moment. Steve’s Blog is an effort to start a dialogue, one we hope you’ll take part in regularly.

  • Steve’s Blog: Happy 100th Birthday, Roger Angell!
    One of the greatest gifts Roger Angell gave me, and he gave me many, was the perspective neither to minimize nor overstate the diminutions of talent and capability that come with age. I was at my little temporary desk at The New Yorker, where I worked long hours in the summer of 2002 as Roger's editor on the collection Game Time, and Roger popped in to see how I was doing. As part of…
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  • Steve’s Blog: We Need More Books by African American Journalists
    It's an odd thing, suggesting to friends books they ought to write. I remember my last year on the A's beat, covering the team for the San Francisco Chronicle, being in a bar somewhere in the Midwest (Cleveland?) and telling my opposite number on the beat, Howard Bryant of the San Jose Mercury News, that I for one would love to see him do a book talking about what reading Baldwin meant to him.…
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  • Steve’s Blog: Remembering My Favorite Writing Teacher, Lost to COVID
      I arrived at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1980 set on earning my PhD in astrophysics, and left five years later with an English degree and a burning passion for writing and reporting. What happened? John Bishop happened. One brilliant teacher, kind and absurdly generous, lit an internal flare inside of me that illuminated my imagination from within, with arc-welder intensity. “Release your genius,” Bishop told me and the other restless undergrads…
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  • Steve’s Blog: No, Lorrie Moore, No!
    We are in the zombie apocalypse, which my students have been writing about for well over a decade, so young people are mentally prepared. ― Lorrie Moore,  The New Yorker
    Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite writers going back to the '80s, had a good idea: Write about the current crisis feeling like a time of the zombies. That's a thought many of us have had often in recent weeks. I mutter zombie jokes to my…
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  • Steve’s Blog: Ultimate Musical Suggestion for Book Lovers
    I told him, "Well, you can't sing, but it's the WAY you can't sing that's good. It has a sort of dark, sleazy feel to it. ... a combination of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits." ― Gaff Music label head Scott Beal on novelist Madison Smartt Bell (pictured above, with Don Dixon)
    I find that during Lockdown, I more often want to put on music when I'm in cooking, unloading the dishwasher or just…
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