Teaching

In addition to my writing and consulting, I teach in the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. All of my classes are part of the Certificate of Online Journalism, but open to everyone .

Online Classes

This course examines the history of sports writing in its evolution both as a form and as a profession and looks at some of the classic and contemporary examples of the genre. Eschewing the genres of as-told-to sports bios, teaching books, and coffee-table volumes, we will move back and forth from work that is both lyrical and idealized to writing that is satirical or probing. We will read selected writings, current magazine and newspaper sports journalism, and our own class work in the form of drafts that students will post for one another online. Each student will be required to complete several short papers and an extended sports story.

Registration begins April 1, 2008

This course focuses on two arts, music and movies, both of which offer students opportunities for practice in reviewing and feature-writing as well as a chance to explore a rich body of books and articles. In addition to frequent, online writing there will be three assigned papers: a personal essay, a review of a film, and a long feature about a musician; extensive essay and book readings will be supplemented by periodic newspaper and magazine selections, as well as the viewing of three movies, and our online music discussions will be augmented by several audio clips.

Registration begins April 1, 2008

At once experiential and professional, hands-on and intellectual, The Writing Life will explore how a journalist/writer lives, what s/he does each day, the books s/he reads and writes, the interactions with editors and publishers, the travel, the solitary laptop hours, the joys, the pains, the hopes, the disappointments...the ambitions, the doubts, the thrills, the deep satisfactions. Encompassing content as diverse as Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, essays by Joan Didion, Stanley Crouch, and E.B. White, and Kerouac’s letters, The Writing Life will do what it discovers, as the course itself will become an online version of the very thing it celebrates. Incorporating a component of the evolving online writing life, this new course will be taught by a longtime newspaper reporter/magazine writer/book author who has himself lived a writing life for more than 25 years. Frequent papers will grow out of intense online discussion and a wide variety of fascinating, inspiring reading.

Registration begins on July 23, 2008