Happy Holidays!

I’m heading to the States in a few days, so I thought I’d take a moment now just to wish all my friends a Merry Christmas, a Happy Chanukah, and if you don’t celebrate either of those, a happy break. This blog post actually is my 500th post!...

My Year in Books

It’s been a good year — lots of wonderful books, many written by real honest-to-goodness friends. I even decided to reorganise my bookcase so that I have a shelf dedicated to books written by friends. Alas, you can’t take a picture of an ebook and I...

Giving Permission

In my recent post here about character development, I touched on the idea of “giving permission.” Tania Hershman wrote about this a short while ago here and her post really made me think. She was teaching an Arvon course, and said that an important idea...

Teaching Character Development

courtesy of adhocactorsAs part of my activities as Writer-in-Residence at  SOAS, I am sometimes asked to help figure out ways to get students thinking outside of the box. One problem we have been discussing is how 1st year language students can be taught to use the...