A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

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This post is about David Crosby’s concert for a friend.

I know a CEO who wears cowboy boots and blue jeans and keeps a folded wad of crisp Ben Franklins in his pants pocket. His name is Glade Knight and he lives on a ranch outside Richmond. Twenty-five years ago he rescued a private girls school that had gone under and turned it into a liberal arts college called Southern Virginia University. I started teaching there 10 years ago. And even though I now reside in Connecticut, I run the university’s Institute for Writing and Mass Media, a non-profit that I founded to help students prepare for careers in media. You can check out what we do in this new video.

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MEETING A BEATLE

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This actually happened.

Yesterday I was at a rehearsal with David Crosby in LA. He and his band are getting ready for the tour that starts next week. Partway through the rehearsal, David stepped outside for some air. A blue Corvette pulled up and the window went down. The driver was Paul McCartney.

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ROCK ‘N’ WRITE

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You know things are out of whack when you bring your work to the bedroom. But my wife has been out of town for the past couple weeks and I’ve got a deadline looming on a big biography. So I’ve been keeping my laptop beside my bed, enabling me to write until I fall asleep, and then resume the moment I wake up.

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SHARING MY FRIENDS

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I’m in the board room at Simon & Schuster, my publisher. The walls are white. There is a l-o-n-g rectangular table surrounded by high-back chairs. My students are sitting in them. Each student has a cell phone on the table. But the students are looking at my editor, Jofie Ferrari-Adler. He’s at the head of the table with a bunch of bestsellers spread out before him – The Oregon Trail, Hothouse, Rin Tin Tin, Men in Green. He’s talking about what makes a great cover.

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THE GREAT DIVIDE

This op-ed appears in the Hartford Courant today and in the Deseret News tomorrow.

“Dad, I want to go to the Women’s March to protest against Donald Trump.” It was Inauguration Day and my 14-year-old daughter, Maggie May, wearing a “nasty women make history” T-shirt, was determined.

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