Community in the end is not what it’s all about—at least for artists. What we see, hear and smell is the core of our work, and the core of our survival.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
Books That Changed My Life
I have special respect for teachers because I finally had to admit, a few years ago, that I can’t do it… at least not directly.
Now, Wait…
All writers complain at one time or another about the time we spend waiting: for the proposal to be read, and accepted or rejected; for the manuscript to be edited; for the final longed-for publishing date to arrive.
Ten Favorites: A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Ten Favorites: She’s the Woman Wearing a Red Hat
Our books are expensive and employ language that is rapidly becoming obsolete. They are sold in bookstores, which are themselves, special, separate, threatened, and rare. These books are written slowly, sometimes painfully, and edited slowly, and also sometimes with pain, all to conform to a standard: what serious literature ought to be. But to uphold a standard that no longer means anything to most people seems an exercise in futility.
Ten Favorites: Starting Something — The Women’s Project, New York
It was the 1980’s and the three of us-Julia, Joan and I-were possessed by the spirit of the times-that energizing, reckless, laughing spirit that was born of the modern women’s movement. We could do anything. Even stir up trouble.
The Last Rose of Summer
These sisters, my father remembered, always sang and accompanied themselves on the piano at this time of year in a duet to the dying of summer, called “The Last Rose of Summer”
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning: Adrienne Rich and Colette
So often, when I’m teaching in these uncelebrated venues to women who sometimes seem lost to my word, I feel fruitless and frustrated; yet any one of the many women I have taught might, also, has written WOW next to startling lines in a poem they would never have read without my class.
Homage To…
As I try to understand something about Barcelona, this anthill on the coast that seems closer to Miami than to Sevilla, I am reading George Orwell’s half-forgotten “Homage to Catalonia.”
Remembering Nora Ephron
A lot of us are feeling a sense of loss on hearing that Nora Ephron is dead at 71-not because we knew her, saw her movies or read all her writing-but because she came to represent something hard to define about an era that began with the first issue of Ms. in 1973 when Ephron was what was called a “mail girl” at Esquire.