I took journalism courses at the University of New Hampshire. My training was formal – I learned some of the ins and outs of writing stories about other people, places, and things.

I later did a stint as a reporter, for several Alaska publications. I enjoyed feature writing. And I really enjoyed first person feature writing. The problem was, the publications that I worked for were really small, so I had to do a large bit of everything – layout, hard news, features, obituaries, photography, and the like.

The exception was my working for the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. There I was a copy editor and layout person. I don’t know why I had such a hard time with it.

At the time, the newspaper was starting a publication, a weekly magazine called Heartland. I tried to get the then editor, Kent Sturgis, to change my status, from copy editor to feature writer, but he seemed to think that the feature writing staff was large enough.

So instead, I enrolled in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and got my MFA in Creative Nonfiction writing.

Here, I found my intellectual niche, which was creative nonfiction writing. CNF is nonfiction writing that incorporates elements of fiction writing. It also has roots in the personal essay. CNF differs from literary nonfiction writing, which is extended third person reportage.

Writer John McPhee could be considered the father of literary nonfiction writing – but he’s as of late been writing creative nonfiction; this has been taking the form of memoir writing.

I had a hard time when working on my Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric because the emphasis was on academic writing. Had my committee had any foresight, it would have encouraged me to pick up where I left off when working on my MFA degree.

I have published some, but not a lot of creative nonfiction writing. I am now, at least in my head, working on Shelf Life: A Book About an Overabundance of Books. I must admit, I have come full circle, having begun writing about others, and moved on to writing about myself.

The problem is this. I now am suffering from writer’s block. Here I am, dealing with thousands of books, some good, some not so good, some really great. My first question is, if published, will my book end up being a part of the overabundance problem? Or will it stand the test of time and have a deserved readership? I also am wavering because I suspect that I will need to do research. There are problems nationwide, with too many books with the same title being published nationwide. I need to look into this. And all I really want to do is to tell my own story.

I have now identified the problem. Now I need to solve it.

Next: 7. 1/7/25: How Could it Be?