We sat down together in November, my delightful editor and I. Truly, Elizabeth is delightful. Soft-spoken, encouraging, joyful, savvy, and a real Powerhouse of a Person. Elizabeth Gets Things Done. So I sat down with her because I needed a little help with the whole social media aspect of this book publishing thing. My edits […]
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The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a coloring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life On July 29, 1981, […]
Read moreSo, this past Thursday was kind of a big day for me: I finished the edits on my first novel. Which means I’m finished with it. Done. The project is no longer in my hands. Crazy how years of thinking and writing became months and weeks of editing became the ten-second, quotidian task of attaching […]
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Introduction: World Lit Survey II, Spring 1988 I’d seen him long before I had him for class; I doubt I could have helped it. He was that very tall man, head and shoulders above most of us, moving through Calderwood Hall between classes. His was that head of wild, graying hair; his the thick, graying […]
Read moreOccasionally, I find, there are mornings like these: when it seems best to leave all the windows open because outdoors the sky is an unbroken blue, and the sunlight folds and flashes on the shining backs of leaves that we know now can’t possibly last. Mornings when the wind gusts and then is still again, […]
Read moreA well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, “Do you think I could be a writer?”“Well,” the writer said, “I don’t know…. Do you like sentences?”The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am twenty years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, […]
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“How is your book doing?” she asked me, and I loved the question for the way she worded it: As if the book itself was doing, as if it had agency, a life of its own. As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue […]
Read more“‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?’‘Saints and poets, maybe, they do some.’”—Thornton Wilder, Our Town Seamus Heaney died last Friday. He was only 74– a bit young, in my opinion, in this late age, to shuffle off this mortal coil. His death is our loss entirely. I don’t know […]
Read morehttp://cdn.tss.uproxx.com/TSS/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/the-great-gatsby-2012.jpg I love going to the movies. Despite all that Netflix and Amazon have to offer, there is something so simply great about going to the cinema and sitting there in the dark, releasing yourself to the larger-than-life narrative unfolding on the screen. I love it. One of the best classes I took in college […]
Read moreYes, this is a familiar feeling. I recognize it– and I don’t like it. I would imagine, too, that it’s almost universal: that sense of having a deadline, Something Due, and so everything else must wait, or take a back seat to it, anyway. Of course, deadlines are helpful. Even necessary. I have talked about […]
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