For my “Doris,” a home at the university her father founded…you will understand my delight and appreciation as well as my humility in the face of the many challenges I will encounter as I being to write.
Blog Posts on Writing and Authors
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.
Lexington’s Literary Feasts: When Good People Go All Out For Writers
A few days ago I spent time in Lexington, Kentucky, one of the prettiest towns I’ve ever visited, in order to be a featured writer at the annual Literary Feasts, which supports the Lexington Public Library.
And Again, Adrienne
How reassuring it is to find a second appraisal, to my mind more sensitive and compelling than the first, in The New York Times (March 31).
Adrienne Rich Is Dead
In my heart, she has a special place because of some curious connections: she was at Radcliffe a few years before me, in the wretched fifties, and came out of that experience with formal training, an early marriage, and three sons.
What They Really Want Isn’t Fame or Fortune But Permission to Articulate Their Feelings
This essay, by Steve Almond, from the March 25th edition of The New York Times, comes like a bombshell, dispelling not only my notions about why people take the writing workshops I teach, but why I often find teaching them frustrating.
The Uses of Scandal
Next week, as I begin to unravel the many strands of Doris Duke’s life, I must work hard to clear away my prejudices.
Barney Rosset
BARNEY ROSSET died a few days ago and the New York Times ran a long obituary on February 23, celebrating his role in freeing the U.S. reading public from censorship.
A Perhaps Hand
“Spring is like a perhaps hand in the window,” e e cummings wrote, and while I can never literally explain what he meant—what line of poetry can be literally explained?—the line always comes to mind when I see the first hints that spring will eventually be here, even in the mountains of northern New Mexico: a bud encrusted with snow, a nest that will soon be used, the first leaves of the daffodil bulbs I planted last fall.
Mr. Toad
Sitting long hours in the classroom arouses in me the restlessness that was the bane, or perhaps the blessing of my childhood: when will I be let out? Eventually the discussion catches my attention, but first there is the longing for the open road that I first encountered, in fiction, in Kenneth Grahame’s delicious The Wind in the Willows.