One day during our most recent family vacation, my son pulled The Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick, off the shelf of a bookstore in Santa Cruz. This strange and visionary book became the unlikely diving board for my latest project, a book based on letters my maternal grandmother […]
Why Recycle? It’s a good thing my grandmother decided not to make lamps from the spent brass shell casings she found near her cabin in the Mojave Desert, a few miles from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. She had quite a collection built up before […]
I own more books than I know what to do with. I trip over them, kicking them across the floor; I find them in the dust under the furniture (“so that’s where Lord of the Flies went!”) I had a Kindle for a while, thinking it would […]
Write Like a Kid I have the two latest California Poets in the Schools anthologies on my desk: If the Sky Was My Heart (2014) and Sing to the Heart of the Forest (2013). The more I read them, the more I understand why I read them, […]
Happy 2015! I wish all of you a prosperous and creative New Year. Thanks also to everyone who takes the time to read this blog. Let’s kick off January with a post about writing book reviews. The Art of the Review In the Sunday, December 28, […]
This is the final post for 2014. I’ll be back in January with musings on Shakespeare, why I’m a sucker for kids’ poetry, the pros and cons of daily practice, prose vs. poetry, writing reviews, basking in obscurity, and other observations from the writing life. Thirteen […]
Step Up to the Open Mike Everyone in the café heard me clear my throat into the microphone, my “hello” startling me through the loudspeaker. Fifteen years old and wearing a dress I’d made from an Indian bedspread, I delivered a quavering version of “Cameroon,” my favorite […]
The Black Dogs of Rejection Thomas Mann said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” We writers sweat over every sentence, agonize, rewrite, and rewrite some more. When we finally get a piece of writing ready […]
My Father the Teacher Recently, my mother sent me a poem I wrote at the age of six on a sheet of mimeograph paper. I turned the poem over and saw that I’d written it on the back of a copy of my father’s 1967 teaching schedule from […]
“Writers often talk about the books that influenced them, but what are your nonliterary influences?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/as-a-writer-what-influences-you-other-than-books.html?ref=review&_r=0 – Bookends, NYTimes, Sunday 11/9/14 Thomas Mallon and James Parker answer the question in two short essays. Mallon writes that he keeps “photos around me while I write the way other authors keep […]
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