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 […]
Alina as a young reader, lost in a book I’m happy to have Young Adult author Alina Sayre as my guest on today’s post. I met Alina at Village House of Books in Los Gatos last spring during California Bookstore Day. Her spirit and enthusiasm were infectious, as […]
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 […]
The following is reprinted from my book Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets, PushPen Press 2014. Deep Images Years ago, I was a student in a drawing class trying to draw a tree. My teacher came by and said, “What you’ve drawn is your idea of a tree. […]
“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 […]
Being Present I recently watched The Artist is Present, a documentary about Marina Abramović. Abramović is known as the “grandmother of performance art.” She has cut and burned herself, ingested anti-psychotic drugs, and invited people to manipulate her body with a variety of objects, including “a rose, a […]
Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin, Germany. My return trip from Berlin last week started with an airline pilots’ strike and ended with a twenty-seven hour trip that required eight boarding passes. I was relieved to get home, to say the least. My article about the Zebra Poetry […]
I’m leaving in a few hours to attend the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Berlin, Germany. This is my second festival, and I am really looking forward to it. Zebra is the biggest poetry film festival in the world, and the oldest. It started in 2002 and […]
The last of my posts for Awkword Paper Cut. It’s been a long, dry spell in the West: Drought: What is it Good For? In California, a four-year drought has left the landscape brittle and the people irritable. I was complaining to a friend about the dead weeds […]
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