On a platform at the front of the hall was a school teacher’s desk, a single chair, a strip of carpet and a single-pole coat stand.  Like eager rock fans, we were student writers...

Don’t get the big head. My father used to say that to me.  I assume that he meant no one likes a swell head, an arrogant, cocky person. We all need humility—some more than...

40,000 years ago, Sgt Pepper taught the band to play. The band was Homo sapiens (our species) at approximately the same time—give or take thousands of years—that our ancestors...

Every child is an artist. Their early drawings all have a bright yellow sun above smiling stick-like figures standing among loopy red flowers on a  green line—the edge of the...

Sometime before we left tricycles for bicycles, my brother and I played “men.”  I was Mr. Black and he was Mr. Brown.  We made phone calls and went to work.  We turned our...

To create means to bring into existence. Creativity, then, is “the use of imagination or original ideas to create something” (according to the Oxford English Dictionary) that did...

Total up the number of conferences you’ve attended, divide by the number of panelists you’ve listened to and what do you remember? Out of the swirl of comment, the ebb and flow...

I met a pair of Peace Corps volunteers at a bar in Bangkok in 1992.  They were leaving Thailand and I had just arrived—my first visit to Thailand.  So, they gave me a briefing on...

He died before the wheel was invented, before writing was invented and before the first pyramids were built.  Yet, we know what he ate for his last meal and what he wore on the...

“I’m about as creative as a caged hamster.” - My friend who thinks he’s not creative.   How creative is a caged hamster?  We won’t know until the hamster lets himself out of...