In his 2022 memoir, Directed by James Burrows, this famous and prolific television director recalls highlights of his productive and highly successful career in creating and directing situation comedies. which included Taxi, Cheers, Frazier, Friends, Mike and Molly, Will and Grace, and more. The son of Abe Burrows, a prominent radio and stage director, he attended Yale Drama School in a time when we were all using grad school as a way to postpone the draft during the Vietnam war. There, he realized, by following his dad around he had picked up by osmosis a solid grounding in stage management. In his warm, humble and personal voice, Burrows describes how he branched out from there to his first television directing job, for the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and ultimately reshaped TV situation comedy into its modern format. Moreover, ...READ MORE

This month I feature an article in my e-zine, Pub 1.2: A Reason to Care: Mainstream Your Memoir, my hard-won secrets on how good biographers and memoir writers engage their readers.

A Writer's Journey, a behind the scenes look at the world of publishing, is an insider's look at the rapidly expanding univere of writing and publishing. From my own experience in many years of writing and a lifetime of reading, I've learned a thing or two. My goal is to provide a free introduction to this world, based on my own writer's journey, that of my fellow writers, collaborators and other experts who have something to contribute to this complex story. Here’s an outline of what I plan to cover in the months to come, amounting to a free guide to the many facets of today's publishing industry....READ MORE

St. Louis Writers' Reunion, holding our own books, at 6 North Cafe, Ballwin, Missouri.

In her inspired yet often interrupted writing career, my mother Alice Green chronicled women's key role on the home front during World War II. Before he left for the war, Dad helped her make a wide-ranging pitch to the news syndicates to publish her humorous episodes of the war worker's and housewife’s wartime plight in a weekly column. She too was undone by wartime scarcity: the lack of newsprint to add her work to the slimmed-down daily papers. I incorporated her several earnest attempts to write her own story and published her work as Radio: One Woman’s Family in War and Pieces. She had finally made it: Ward Greene, Executive Editor of King Features Syndicate, had written her a long rejection letter: “You write extremely well, and what you have to say is a story that should be told. Someday it will be told in a book, and I hope you will be the one to write it.”

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