The Athletics of Writing

You start out by trying to wake up and get the brain going so you go for a run or a bike or something to flood the neurons with blood and get the connections going that make writing writing. The best plots laid while shooting down country roads or jogging paths or pumping under a big iron dumbbell. And then there is the shower to further get you into the world and getting dressed and then  it is time to fuel up. An article in the New York Times says that your brain is depleted by exercising, that the glycemic index plummets and then when you eat it ramps up sixty percent higher than before. Rocket fuel.

So now you are finishing up your eggs and toast and coffee. Two cups while you read your latest jumpstarter novel or short story to prime the pump. Pop the vitamins and read a little more and now you are buzzing. A lot of psychic steam is in play from thinking, exercise, food and caffeine. Close the book and walk upstairs to your garret. During all this prep you talk to no one. You watch nothing. Maybe a little low classical music to further wake up the brain. And now you are shutting the doors and drawing the blinds and sitting down at the chair in the darkened room.

Kick off the shoes and put your feet up on the legs of the chair and position the notebook with your latest notes and maybe some sugary cereal for an extra buzz and in go the ear plugs and you look at the page and go for two hours straight. You blast along like a madman letting all that psychic steam out and by the end you need the cereal and you finish your ten or fifteen pages and it is game over for the day. Now you spend the rest of the day reading and thinking and doing life things until you start all over and wake up the next day and wonder if you ever will write again.

But you do.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Best Guess of the Novelist

You know what your best guess is. It is the book you have not undertaken because it might be great or it might be a colossal failure of years and time and money. The modern novelist is stuck between selling and fame and artistic merit if not immortality. You could out Franzen Franzen but if you fail then you will have used up precious ideas not acted upon and the fact is you literally only have so much time to write so many novels before you earn yourself a slab in a cold dark cemetery.

These are the thoughts novelist deal with every day. Write something containable and marketable and safe or throw it all to the wind like that first novel you were never sure you could finish or even what the name of it was going to be. You settle down with novel two and three and four is the beginning of something new but you have not knocked the roofs off for a while if ever and you are wondering if your best guess as a novelist might really be your best.

And so there you stand at your crossroads. Take a shot at the prize or keep drinking the swill that might pay off with repetition and various ideas if not various genres. The stakes have become very high now. Only one novel gets the prize of the New York literary establishment lining up to ensure success. This years winner was The Art of Fielding. A wide ranging baseball novel that was pretty milk toast when it came to the end, but no matter, it had won the prize and publishing lined up and swung the big bat and the ball did sail out of the park.

So there you have it. The prize or settle into your comfortable mediocrity and produce good novels that hopefully lots and lots of people will read. Or take your best guess... and go for it.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide

Back to Work

Back to work after the holidays. Writers like everyone else have to remember what they have been doing for the last month of the holidays but unlike other people there is no easy system to plug back into. Most people return to the office and slog around and talk about the long holidays and slowly get back to work. Writers return to their garage or their basement or their attic or the desk in the corner and sit down with their coffee to find the thread again. And if you have taken off a lot of time then that thread is elusive.

It is a different way of thinking. The system is created by you and only you enforce it. You are the taskmaster who must demand the work be done. No easy thing in the dog days of January where the sun only shines for a bit and we return to the darkness of a Northern Winter. But the writing must continue. So you open up and start typing, looking for that magic of about a month before. Maybe you wrote through the holidays, but most people have to put it down for a while to satisfy family and friends and themselves.

It is the routine that has been obliterated and for the working nine to fivers the routine starts again on the commute. But the writer has no armor and since routine is self imposed then it must be started again like an engine that has been cold and out of gas for a good month in the shed. Usually it takes about a week for the cobwebs to clear out and the engine to run again efficiently. The first few days are just blowing out the pipes with the promise it will get better. By Friday you should be back to where you were.

If not, maybe the next week. Or the week after that, but the  muse will return... probably just in time for Easter.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Hemingways Attic...a writers survival guide

The Brutal Truth About Publishing

The brutal truth is that publishing is harder and easier now. Anyone can produce a book and put it out there on for a Kindle download. The time from conception to e-publication is measured now in nanoseconds. Literally someone can write a book one day and publish it the next. It might not be any good but they can tell friends and neighbors to look them up on Amazon. But here is the brutal truth: no one will buy it because it will be a speck of sand among millions of other specks.

And so publishing in a strange way has become more rarefied. More exclusive. The dunning of millions of authors cancels out the playing field. The noise from three million books reaches a critical mass where no one can get their message out. Except for the few. The few who are published by the mainstream large publishers who put the muscle behind the book to blow right past the Hoover Dam of published authors. And they do it the old fashioned way; with lots of money.

Start with the million dollar advance. This author has a huge advantage over his kindle published brethren. For one he or she can make a living as an author. Right there the stream is narrowed drastically. But the publisher now has to make that million dollars back and they do it by pumping money into pushing that book. While the kindle author tries to get his book reviewed, five thousand galleys go flying out to bookstores, reviewers, bloggers. Publicists and marketers follow up and the word shoots out that this is a big book. The noise of all the self published authors is drowned out by a single tidal wave of publishing muscle.

Then the buzz starts and the author and the book steadily climb onto the bestseller list. The self published author sells a few copies and then simply disappears. Now there are exceptions. There are now authors selling a million ebooks on Amazon. We have all heard these stories and they are inspiring. But for the majority of authors who decide that watching their Amazon rankings tick a few times down and seeing their name in print is worth more than the years of learning their craft, the fate is a dismal one. Utter obscurity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there is no greater difference than that between the amateur and the professional in the arts.  This is probably more true today where the amateur runs to immediate gratification while the professional labors on in pursuit of their craft. There still is no substitute for first rate work even in the age of the internet and the digital word.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

All Those Manuscripts in a box

You have them if you write. Manuscripts in a musty box in a basement. Apologies to all those writers who hit it every time with their books and their box is empty or nonexistent. But for everybody else you know what I am talking about. They are the books that just didn't work for whatever reason. A lot of times it takes years to figure that out. Sometimes you see very early on the book is not there and give it up for another project, but usually it is during the third or fourth or fifth or twentieth rewrite the pottery reveals it's cracks and you sigh a collective, oh shit.

The first novel a lot of times makes it. Maybe it's just fresh, but that second book is in danger right away. There is a inclination to try and duplicate what worked before or go way out on a limb and try something extremely different. Both attempts usually fail. For myself I tried a stock thriller that after diagramming and interviewing people and countless drafts just sort of gave itself up as a really bad idea that led to a really bad book. Then the title changed five times and it was just dead.

I followed that with a novel about early yuppies who give it all up to find meaning. Hmmm...Dated before it was even done. Really really bad. That one imploded early and only cost me a year. Then there was the logging book that dragged on for years and then a series of starts that never saw the light of day. What can you say? Writing is like a gun and there are are a lot of misfires. But, occasionally, it comes together and makes every bad novel just a stepping stone along the way. That' what you tell yourself anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off April 26th

The Writers Factotum

When you are a writer you do anything. Anything. Bukowski's second novel, Factotum, proves the point beautifully and the movie does the same. You accept right away that every job you ever have is temporary. You accept that every job is just a means to an end and the end is writing. You evaluate the job in how much time it gives you to write. That's it. Nothing else matters. Not the money. Not the job itself. Just how much time it gives you to plow away at your craft.

Best factotum job I ever had was security guard. Pile up the books in the Wrigley building on Michigan Avenue and watch the hours dribble away. Midnight to eight AM. Nothing to do but make the rounds of the building from the coal chutes in the basement to the little room up in the clock tower. Scribble in the log. 1300 Saw a bug. 1400 Squashed a bug. 1500 No bugs. Sometimes they got on me about the log so I wrote more. 1300Saw a bug. Roach. Big. Moving south down the hallway. 1400 Followed roach into men's room. 1500 Smashed roach into a brown smear. That usually did the trick. Mostly I just read. Eight hours of reading literature. Great job.

Then there was the janitor job. Custodian. Stationary engineer. My boss laid it down for me. Just stay lost. Here is your broom. Just stay lost and make sure no one runs out of toilet paper. I read in the bathroom stalls. Stopped the freight elevator between floors and read whole novels. Kept the toilet paper up. Took rolls home for my own use. Pushed around the same dust for hours. Read Read and Read some more. Lost the job when they said someone was stealing rolls of toilet paper. How low can you go.

After that there was construction cleanup, the railroad, waitering, mortgages, renting apartments, teaching. Teaching was the worst factotum job. They wanted you to work and know the students name and read their work. I didn't know anybodies name and didn't read anybodies work. The bakery. Working the night shift at the bakery. Great factotum job. Take orders all night long until about two AM. Then just sit in the shipping office with the loaves going around conveyor belts all night long. The smell of the long loaves was amazing. The Italians with the flour all over their faces screaming what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. Then I got to take hot bread home in my jacket on my motorcycle. Blasting through the streets of Chicago with a nights worth of literature and hot bread against my stomach.  Nothing better than the factotum life man.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will blast off in April

The Confessions of an Ex Cable News Junkie

Hello my name is Bill, I am a cable news junkie. Recovering. I fell off the wagon a year ago and started watching hours and hours of cable news beginning with Keith Olbermann, then Rachel Maddow, then Chris Matthews, then Lawrence O'Donnell. Some nights I watched three hours of straight talk with the same topics regurgitated on every show but I didn't care. Hell, I was such a junkie I switched to Fox and watched The Factor and Sean Hannity during commercial breaks. Talk about addicted.

But I am back on the wagon and I have gone cold turkey. I have to say it has not been hard this time around. I don't know what happened, but suddenly I just didnt' care. I just couldn't buy off on Rachel's impassioned carefully researched, fully felt, emphatically delivered diatribes on why don't ask don't tell should be abolished and why it wasnt' happening. Maybe it is because it did happen and when she announced it on her show in a town hall meeting everyone clapped FOR HER like she was the President who had just accomplished getting rid of the policy!

Or maybe it was Keith Olbermann who I really dug and would watch sometimes two or three times a night! I just couldnt' get enough. But then I started to realize there were never any guests from the other side. And how many times can he have Eugene on from the Washington Post in his super hip glasses? Or the little guy from The Nation who stands in for him? Or Howard from Newsweek then the Huffington Post in his scarf and hipster long hair? It just began to feel regurgitated with his question at the beginning: How many of these stories will you be talking about tomorrow? Um, really none of them.

Or  Chris Matthews yelling at everyone and letting no one finish. Or Lawrence O'Donnell with his quirky sense of humor and his government experience allowing himself to get the last word. Or even Anderson Cooper keeping them honest with his white hair and dwarfish good looks. Don't get me wrong. I could easily fall off the wagon and go back to my old ways of watching three straight hours a night, but I think what is different this time is I started to wonder what else I could be doing with that time! And that's what really got me. Forget that it is really entertainment, that there are millions of people watching the guys on the other side, that it doesn't really matter at all because these are talk show hosts. Forget all that, here is what really got me back on the wagon and why I will never return to the cable news wasteland.

I could have probably written another novel with all the time I wasted in front of the boob tube getting riled up all night. Ouch. Now that hurts.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Choosing a Point of View

I'm going to start a new novel after Christmas and I have the plot squared away and I know what I have to research, but I haven't decided on a point of view. I assumed third person would allow me to do everything I wanted and had pretty much made up my mind, but then I started reading some old first person novels and thought about taking it straight first person. This would allow me to get cozy with the reader right away and also give me the latitude to throw in everything but the kitchen sink as a I muse along. I have written three first person novels and one third person and I like, as most Americans, having someone tell me a story as if they are sitting next to me. But there are drawbacks.

First person depends entirely on voice. If you don't have an  interesting narrator then first person will not work. The voice of the author should draw a reader in and there should be a melody, a musical quality to the narrator that is pleasing to the ear. I write from the sound of prose as most writers do. You can just tell when something is not right and so you play with the words or the voice until it flows with an unbroken cadence. Of course some first person narrators attack the reader and fight against cadence. But it is the way we like our stories told and there it is no coincidence that blogging with its first person narrator is so popular. It is the great "I" telling the story and we are there.

Now the problem is there are limits. We cannot be everywhere as a narrator and that limits our scope. So that brings in a strong authorial third person. Authors used to be much more assertive, talking to the reader and coming out from behind the curtain. Now a lot of our omniscient narrators hide behind the curtain and tell the story without getting in the way. A lot of people prefer this as they don't want some author getting in the way of  characters and action and giving his or her take on what is happening. We want the author to be essentially invisible, a voice from above.

Or you can get esoteric and use second person which is you. You take the train. You feel sick. You punch the man. You arrive at work and hang your hat and look at your watch. You know that it is a long time from lunch. I am using second person in this essay. I do it in most of my posts about writing and politics. It allows the reader to be part of the story...You. But you have to make a decision about what you want to use in your story.

So I will have to make up my mind soon. I am drifting toward third person because I just don't have a powerful voice nudging my authorial narrator aside. But if he does then I will go with it. And so should you.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The Writer's Dream

My life changed in one summer. I had just signed a two book deal with Bantam after years of struggling in total obscurity and actually been  paid good money after making nothing for years and now was on my way to the Big Apple to ink the deal and have dinner with my new editor and agent. A  year before my manuscripts had been sitting in the basement in a box where I put all those books and stories that never see the light of day, but events had flipped on their head as they tend to do in the careers of writers and acrobats and now I was headed for a victory tour of sorts.

The dinner was on the lower East side in a French restaurant with Conan O'Brien at the next table and you sort of leave the table and float down the street in the warm summer night because finally finally you have broken through to the other side. I didnt' know exactly what the other side would bring, but the biggest change is you have to adjust the way you think about yourself. Failure had been the shadow following me for years and I really wasn't used to that new ghost called success, but here she was. And so I sat and made small talk with the two people who could potentially launch my stalled literary career and then it was over and I was waking up the next morning.

I went for a run and then walked down through Manhattan still hung over and buzzing on adrenalin. I was due to meet my agent again that evening, but for now I was free and I drifted into an old bookstore and bought two very old editions of Fitzgerald Short Stories( Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers)  They were the original Scribner binding with the cut pages and the slightly smaller than trade size. Second editions that I picked up for a hundred bucks, but I was making money now. And then I started walking down Fifth Avenue and that's when it hit me.

It was summer in Manhattan and one of those hot blowy days where everyone has left. I walked with my two books and knew then something had ended. I had struggled for ten years to get published and now I had and whatever happened next would be consumed with business and sales and publisher agent shenanigans. And so I walked and walked and walked those empty streets with my two copies of Fitzgerald on that hot summer day in Manhattan. I walked that whole island.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Finding a Story--The Cop on the Roof

Sometimes a story just falls in your lap. I was sitting at my desk in my one room hole above a Thai restaurant with my window open to the curry and airy traffic and my neighbors not ten feet away in the next apartment building over right outside the clanking old fire escape when I heard police radios. I had been hacking away trying to find a story all morning that I thought would be worthy of one of the literary magazines or any magazine for that matter and was just about to give up when I heard the police radio again. Then I saw the cops.

There were two of them working their way cautiously up the fire engine red fire escape and they had paused to catch their breath outside my open window. I stuck my head  out and met two big mustaches  and cold eyes under shiny brims. Hello officers. They grunted and stared across at the apartment building window right across from mine. You seen any activity in that apartment? Nope. We had a call that someone isnt' responding to calls. Oh. I stared at the window with a curtain covering the  lower half. I climbed  out onto the fire escape with the cops and the three of us stared for any sign of life.

You know Joe. I think I can get a better angle if I head up to the roof. The other cop looked up and nodded. Go ahead. I'll wait here. So we both watched the one cop climb up the ladder to the roof and set himself. I still can't really see in he said still on the escape. I think I'm going to climb on the roof and see if I can look down. So we watched him climb on the roof and lean out. I still can't see he shouted down. The other building was less than five feet away from him now. The cop named Joe hollered up. Why don't you lean on the other building and see if you can get a view?

The cop nodded and then leaned across the two buildings like a bridge. Yeah, OK, I can see into the apartment. Nobodies there. Alright, Joe said. Come on back down. The cop stayed as a bridge against the sky. I can't get back. I'm stuck. Come up and help me. Joe shook his head. No can do. I'm afraid of heights. Now you tell me..Jesus! I can get him back I said to Joe. He shrugged. Go ahead. So I monkeyed up the fire escape and swung onto the roof.

The cop was leaning over with his hands extended to the other building. You going to pull me back?  Yeah. Don't fricking drop me. Alright. I grabbed onto his thick gun belt. You ready? Yeah. Don't drop me. I won't I promised. One two three! I pulled back on his belt and he fell back into me and we stumbled away from the roofs edge. He was sweating and took off his hat and looked at me. I'm getting way too old for this shit, he said shaking his head.

They made their way down the fire escape and I went back in through my window and sat back down at my computer. I banged my story out in less than an hour.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man is due out in January

What a Writing Course Can't Teach You

It might be a contradiction to think that fiction writing can be taught. There are people who clearly  believe you either have it or you don't and that people can coax you along but like a pitcher you have to have the talent to begin with. The problem with writing courses is they have to make hard and fast decisions on what works and doesn't work. Some Universities have their own system that is specific to their curriculum and promises the writer of fiction much improvement if they will only follow their system. The problem is that for a lot of people, a system of writing is death to their creativity.

I taught college fiction writing and saw this first hand. The school had a very specific way of teaching fiction and if I did not follow that methodology then I could go find somewhere else to teach thank you very much. So I slouched along, inserting some of my own philosophies into the course. What I found was writing students starved for an opposing point of view. A lot of these nascent fiction writers hated the system and basically shut down in protest. When I opened up the door that there might a lot of different ways to teach fiction, they breathed like coalminers who had just found light.

This brings up the real core problem with teaching fiction. It is an art. And because writing fiction is an art then like water it slips through your hand the second you try and contain it. Writing fiction is a lifestyle if not a way of living and that cannot be taught. It is not math or German or science. It is a mysterious intersection between the English language and the unconsciousness and therefore wholly undefinable. The real fiction writer will have to find his own way even after graduating from a school of writing. It is when you go off the road that things get interesting.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

What College Doesn't Teach You About Writing

When I graduated college I sat down and read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and didn't know half the words. This is after I had received a Masters in History. So I started a notebook of words and it really wasn't until I worked the night shift for Gonella Bread on the West Side of Chicago that I received my literary education. It was there that I discovered the secrets of men and women who smithed words.


I worked in the shipping office of the bakery and took the bread orders all night long. The phones rang and rang and I sat in the flour and filth that is a bakery with the long loaves and flat rolls going around the bakery on a conveyor belt much like a roller coaster track. The Italians who worked there (they were all Italians) didn't speak much English and they all swore and gesticulated in the shipping office drinking their coffee with the red stain on their tennis shoes from the ink on the long loaf bags they held in place with their shoes.

Alonzo the foreman could speak English and he would come in and shake his head. What the frick you doing with all them books Jack? What in the frick you going to do with them? You need a job not books. You need a good job. Forget about them fricking books. And then he would head back out into the bakery. Around three AM the bread orders would die down and the route drivers would start to appear, sleepily drinking their coffee in the office.

It was then I pulled a book from the stack I kept on the corner of my desk. The stack was two feet high and had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Lowrey, O'Connor, London. I couldn't decide what I wanted to read so I brought it all and for the next three hours I read while the loaves and rolls fell off the conveyor with soft plops to the bakery floor. When the sun started to creep into the loading dock I put on my backpack and loaded up my books.

I went to the conveyor belt and picked off the hot rolls and wrapped them in brown paper and stuffed them in my leather coat. Then I rode my motorcycle home through the cold quiet streets of Chicago with that warm bread keeping me warm. I caught my wife just before she went to work and we had warm bread and coffee. That was my literary education.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.

My First Writing Group

When I was grinding it out in Chicago trying to find a voice I saw an ad in the Chicago Tribune for a writers group on the West Side and decided to give it a try. I had been working like a monk for years on novels and short stories getting nowhere fast except for pasting my room above a Thai restaurant with form rejection letters. So on a hot summer evening I buzzed down Diversey Avenue on my motorcycle to an apartment on a ramshackle street of two flats and buzzed the door that had a small sign WRITERS GROUP UPSTAIRS. No one answered and I went up the creaky old stairs to a room with ten chairs in a circle and an old man with no teeth and long white hair. He extended his hand: "welcome to the group!"

The writing workshop methodology was simple. You read your work to the group and they critiqued it. Simple and brutal. I listened while people were hacked down, some praised. "I like the way you use color." Or the dreaded silence. If somebody read something really awful then the silence moved in and Paul had to say gingerly, "ok comments, let's hear some comments." And then someone would break the ice and the hacking would begin. When my turn came I could feel my heart as I stood up with a short story I had been working on for the last few months.

I cleared my throat and began and read my story. It sounded horrible out loud. A real litmus test. When I finished I heard the awful silence. Paul looked around. "Comments, Comments?' A man named Peewee started off. What's with all the snow? My story was set in winter and snow was integral to theme, plot, setting, it was the iceberg under the water that moved in the background. The avalanche began immediately. Everyone wanted to know why I described snow in such detail and that I should really cut the first three pages. I explained my use of symbolism, the innocence engendered by snow. Snow as a metaphor for the human condition, secretly swearing to never return to this hot, one room  hell hole.

I was depressed for several days after that and walked around telling myself I was well shut of writing groups. What a bunch of losers that they could not understand the central theme of my story. Setting told the bigger picture, had they never read Hemingway? Finally, I sat down and decided to give my story another read. I sat silently at my desk, reading my masterpiece the cretins had not understood. I finished and stared out into the dusky twilight. I looked back down at my story. "What's with all the snow?" I muttered.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.

Go West Young Man--Review of Raymond Carver--A Writers life

Every writer has to find his way. That is the nub of writing fiction. There is no clear path generally speaking and so it becomes a make it up as you go right from the start. When you read a biography of a writer, part of the mystery and the curiosity centers around how did he or she do it and what type of path did they follow to publication and beyond. After reading Ray Caver's biography, I came away with one overpowering sentiment for the aspiring writer--Go West Young Man. Go to Iowa. Go to California.


For those of us who did not follow this mantra we are forever wondering what if. John Irving, Cheever, Wolff, Oates, There were so many writers at Iowa Writers Workshop during Carvers time it is hard to read because he had such good fortune to be around them and one hears the drum again of now why didn't I do that? Of course the biggest plum for Carver was meeting Gordon Lish who then went onto New York to publish Carver in Esquire and then at Knopf. During all this Raymond Carver is a raging alcoholic and still his career marched on.

Ray Carver had very hard times. Extremely hard times. He nearly killed his wife in a drunken rage, his family was torn apart, he literally had no money during long periods of his life, but he managed to mix it up with just about every major writer of his time. This is an amazing thing for a writer. This cross-polinization is critical for developing writers at any stage but particularly in the early years. Surely the Hemingway years on the Left Bank proved the point. And Carver certainly had his own Left bank between the University of Iowa and Universities in California.

For the rest of us who hacked out our path in major cities like Chicago we can only wonder at the great good fortune of someone like Raymond Carver who went through hell in his personal life, but seemed to be at the nexus of literary good fortune at precisely the right moments. Still, one has to follow the path given and so it is useless really to second guess the career of any writer. Certainly few could have survived the searing hell of alcoholism that Raymond Carver went though. But at the end, after his early death from lung cancer, he left behind a sizable amount of work and an incredible legend and if I had to pull one salient lesson from his life, it would be to go where the action is...go where great writers are trying to do great things. Just go.



William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man. His highly praised first three novels Ripples, (Pantonne) LJ highly recommended, ALA Editors Choice, Tobacco Sticks, (Bantam, Best Novels of the Nineties Doris Lesher, Starred Review PW, LJ highly recommended) and Mica Highways, (Bantam,) covered the scope of a coming of age, a courtroom drama set in Virginia in the forties, and a mystery set in the South. Rocket Man is a satire about a man struggling to keep his home. William Hazelgrove is the Hemingway writer in residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. He has written reviews and features for USA TODAY and been the subject of stories in the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and NPR'S All Things Considered.. More information can be gathered at

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/