The Good News of the Barakats, 4.6.2017
Last night, Sharifa Barakat and I had dinner at Central Cafe (along with Imman Musa and Dania Saffaf Atienza). Sarah Dwidar introduced me to Sharifa her freshman year at SLU on sunny day on West…
Category: Writing
The Good News, 3.8.2017
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …
The Good News, 3.5.2017
The Good News is … Natalie Long has a working title for a memoir to come— Wander, Work, Eat, Agitate Natalie discussing how a Community Bill of Rights challenges an unjust legal structure that elevates…
The Good News, 3.3.2017
The Good News is … In 2016 Lindsey Trout Hughes took three on-line writing classes with me, and—to her surprise and my delight— embraced her poetic vocation. She has graced me with epic emails, and scintillating…
A More Lively Mode
I read James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson in the summer of 1999. At the time I was gathering materials for what eventually became The Book of Mev. The following passage from Boswell left its…
Take the Long View
I once wrote for a magazine: I made a calculation, that if I should write but a page a day, at the same rate, I should, in ten years, write nine volumes in folio, of…
Good News Variations: A Spring Writing Course 2017
Since mid-November, I’ve had exchanges with numerous people who were consumed with dread at so much bad news in the news. One afternoon, while walking in the Central West End, I was reminded of…
She Should Have Won the National Book Award
But then I think What do these awards mean They gotta serve somebody I’ve checked the libraries It’s her only book On this—or any— subject Why should the luminaries and guardians honor her Which is…
A Key to Understanding the Table of Contents to “Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine” from Our Friend Fellini
Do you like stories in which nothing happens, too? Well, in my film everything happens … OK? I’m putting everything in … Even the Sailor doing a tap dance. –8 1/2
A Writer and His Readers
And nothing would make me happier than having made it possible for some of my readers to recognize their own experiences, difficulties, questionings, sufferings, and so on, in mine, and to draw from that realistic…