Writer’s life
What we talk about when we talk about editors
I teach creative writing in a men’s prison, at monthly workshops in Princeton, and via email. I’ve taught at universities and writers’ conferences. Everywhere I teach, and no matter whom I teach, at some point the subject of editors inevitably pops up. I mentioned to a student recently that part of my job as a…
Read MoreDon't worry about the other horses.
I recently had an email exchange with an artist whose work I admire greatly. She’s an accomplished photographer whose work, in recent times, she feels is getting lost in the swamp. It seems everybody with an eyeball is snapping away with their digital cameras and calling themselves professional photographers these days, just like everybody with…
Read MoreAntidote to arrogance
Once a week, I teach creative writing in a correctional facility for men. We meet in a classroom on the lower floor of the prison, which one gets to by negotiating the usual labyrinth of corridors, past armed ‘threshold guardians’ of various sorts, descending flights of stairs going down, down, down, and a number of…
Read MoreRiding the tree roots
I wonder if you, like me, have ever found yourself sitting in the dark, tear-stained and brittle with anguish, listening to Tom Waits, perhaps, emptying a bottle of scotch, or a pot of coffee, maybe smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring out a fractured glass into the night, your soul blank, your stomach churning, your thoughts…
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 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 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…
Read MoreExamined on the Examiner
Maybe I should travel more often! I’ve had some lovely things happen while I’ve been away these past two weeks. One was the interview I did with poet Diane Lockward on www.Shewrites.com, which I linked to in the preview blog, and now this: Renee Miller, at www.Examiner.com has written a beautiful review of THE RADIANT…
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