One of the pleasures of teaching at PLNU is that I get to meet great students who become famous Hollywood directors! Here’s my story about Destin Daniel Cretton, director of the new Marvel Universe movie…
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Earlier this year the San Diego Union-Tribune had me as a guest on its podcast called Name Drop San Diego. They called me a “Journalism Guru” in the headline. The timing of the program was…
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In the middle of all of the disruption and pain and loss and confusion and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is at least something we can savor. I wrote about it in the San…
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Two podcasts have posted recently, where the host talked with me about the art and craft of conducting great interviews. One was with a management/leadership resources company in London, England, called Mind Tools, and the…
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I talked to Eugene Peterson on the phone earlier this year, inviting him to an event I was trying to organize in San Diego. I asked him if he’d be willing to come. “No,” he…
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The book I thought I was writing last year was a handbook for writers. But when I submitted it to publishers, one editor responded by saying, “Why aren’t you writing a book about interviewing? You…
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She is the worldwide symbol of selfless service, so when I was given the chance to attend the ceremonies regarding her canonization in Rome, I went for it. No one does pageantry like the Vatican….
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Here’s how a comment can change a life. I was 19, home from college one summer, and volunteering at a youth camp for a week. The camp director put me in charge of entertainment…
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This past spring we had Nikki Giovanni, the poet who helped usher in the Black Arts movement in the 1960s, at our Writer’s Symposium By The Sea. She read some of her poems, then talked…
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This essay of mine appeared recently on Donald Miller’s Storyline Blog. It was a voice out of the wilderness. I was on a path in the mountains in Haiti recently, walking next to a…
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