Tell me what you want
Robert Olen Butler, in his book FROM WHERE YOU DREAM, says the one thing missing from almost every student manuscript he reads is a sense, in the beginning of the work, of what the main character yearns for. He says fiction is “the art form of human yearning” and that writers needs to place an…
Read MoreThe Art of the Subtext
This book is part of The Art of series, put out by the excellent Graywolf Press. Each book in the series examines, I am told on the back of the book, “a singular, but often assumed or neglected, issue facing the contemporary writer of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. The Art of series is meant to…
Read MorePlaying in Inkwood
I was twenty, and it was somewhere round three o’clock in the morning. I sat at a battered desk in the corner of the bedroom in my basement apartment in Montreal. The floor was warped from one of the unending water leaks in the ancient plumbing and the desk wobbled. Charlie Mingus’s music played from…
Read MoreThe river of stories
The other day I visited the Rescue Mission of Trenton, with the group, People & Stories, to talk about literature and life. Diane, a volunteer organizer drove me there. When we arrived we entered an unmarked steel door in the side of a cement block building and when the woman behind the glass saw us,…
Read MoreI would have drunk pond scum
I was in England recently, where there is an ongoing debate about how much folks are drinking. If you Google “binge drinking” and “UK” a depressingly long list of sites pop up. The Brits are trying a number of things to curb the epidemic — physicians now ask their patients directly about their drinking habits,…
Read MoreSHARPENING THE QUILL WORKSHOPS
I am thrilled to announce I’ve begun creative writing workshops in Princeton – last Saturday of every month! I invite you to join us. Although we’re just beginning. We are already a group of friendly, supportive writers — some just starting on the writer’s journey, others already well published. Fiction, memoir, poetry, flash fiction, creative…
Read MoreThe Loneliness of the long distance writer
The other day a young woman asked me what I did for a living. What an interesting question. If I had to live off the money I make from writing, I’d be living in a garden shed. On the other hand, it is through writing that I live. So, in a very real sense, when…
Read MoreREVIEW – The Hidden Gospels – four questions, one path
I believe Alexander Shaia may have written a book which will change the way people look at the gospels entirely, and I’m not just talking about Christians. The gospels, Shaia posits, are not to be taken literally but rather they create a “Great Map of Transformation” universally relevant, regardless of background or viewpoint, even to…
Read MoreRat Medicine on Kindle
I admit I’m excited about this. My first collection of short stories (the book that stared it all), RAT MEDICINE & OTHER UNLIKELY CURATIVES, is now available in Kindle format. (I have one of those, and like it much more than I thought I would.) This book was written in early sobriety. The Globe &…
Read MoreHappy Bloomsday
This is Bloomsday, of course, and literary folks are even now tromping through Dublin, commemorating June 16, 1904, the day on which Stephen Deadalus and Leopold Bloom, the two characters at the heart of James Joyce great wanderdream of a novel have their adventures. (Thursday, June 16, 1904 was, by the way, the date of…
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