“Action Needed, Goethean Action”
Allen Ginsberg, Journals: Mid-Fifties 1954-1958, edited by Gordon Ball During winter and spring of 1996 I went on a binge of poet Allen Ginsberg’s books: poems, letters, photos, journals (I was taking a break from…
Category: Writing
Anne Waldman on The Art of Writing, Reading, and Sharing—Winter Class/Arco-Online 2020
Imagine you are not alone. Consort with other writers. You are in a League of Writing. You are part of a conspiracy to lift the discourse and practice of writing higher. Think of your writing…
Reading Roth on Writing and Reading
George Searles, editor, Conversations with Philip Roth Literary Conversation Series University Press of Mississippi 1992 I settled in this morning with a collection of interviews with Philip Roth, from the bright beginning of his career…
“If Not You, Who?”
Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……
Gratitude/909
I spent the afternoon in Benton Park with exuberant Penny Smith who, last night, pulled out one of her notebooks, opened to a random page and found this advice she’d scribbled down during one of…
“Scribbled Secret Notebooks, and Wild Typewritten Pages, for Yr Own Joy”
Inspired by Diana Raab, Writers and Their Notebooks I read Raab’s book right about the end of my time at SLU. Moving on to Maryville University, I found a way to assign Natalie Goldberg’s Bones…
Aha!
This morning, while writing a letter to one of my favorite poets (who lives in Brooklyn), it dawned on me that I want my next writing/reading class to be on the work and life of…
Share the Wealth with Linsey Stevens: Iphelia and Editing with the Gift of Feeling
What kind of work would you wake up in a hospital bed eager to do? And how is editing like being a doula? The first question is one I answered back in the fall of…
Not a River-Like Novel; But a Novel Like Poetry, or Rather, a Narrative Poem, an Epos in Mosaic, a Kind of Arabesque Preoccupation
Over the weekend Lindsey asked me some questions about my writing process (such as, How long did it take you to write Book of Mev? Did you always know what the structure would be? How did…
Gratitude for Demun Share the Wealth Writing Class
As the summer Share the Wealth Writing Class on Demun winds down, gratitude is, once again, an appropriate theme for meditation (quotations with page number are from Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works!). “A French proverb…