Maureen Buchanan Jones, Author at Public Seminar

Literature

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

January 3, 2022 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that “something extraordinary is going to happen today.”...

Beyond Ekphrasis

Writing your heart out in a museum

January 18, 2018 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Enter any museum, traditional, contemporary, technological, scientific, historical, and you see people moving slowly, standing quietly, observing. All well and good. People arrive in museums to learn and understand art. They study the installation; they ingest the presented explanation and interpretation. Perfectly reasonable and expected. As a young person taken to ...

What’s the Point of a Creative Writing Workshop?

Writing and resistance in the Age of Trump

November 26, 2017 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Two days after the 2016 election, people arrived in my writing workshop talking non-stop. Their disbelief, grief, anger, and guilt at not ‘having done enough,’ ricocheted around the room. It was a challenge for them to focus on the page. In the weeks that followed, this scene repeated itself over ...