Ed was an extraordinary person and a writer I always looked forward to reading. For years he wrote a column in the The Denver Post. His work also appeared in High Country News. He ran small town Colorado newspapers and eventually settled in Salida and later brought into the world the Colorado Central Magazine. He died June 3rd at age 61.
Here is his opening paragraph in a piece published by The Bloomsbury Review in 1984:
Craftsmanship is as important to good writing as it is to good carpentry or good bricklaying. And like those skills, literary craftsmanship can be taught. Some of it can be learned from books, although a good editor will teach more than a dozen libraries. But the best writing demonstrates more than mere skill with the language; it is inspired stuff. The prime rule of writing, after all, is not “Write what you know” or “Spell correctly” or “Query first”; it is “Have something to say.”
The piece is still worth reading, both for what he says and for the source books on “the art of writing” in his review. You can find his essay here: “Writing Wrongs in Writing Books: “How to Write” Right Rules Are Too Soon Broken.”