I’ve driven down that particular block a few times, seen the various shanties and campsites of other lost, muse-abandoned creative’s waiting for their purgatorial moment to pass. What I was experiencing looked nothing like this.
The artist is one who must stand at the still point of a turning world and simply watch, and in watching, see.
It might be said that Dickens’s fiction – holiday and otherwise – plumbs the blackened, sooty depths of human depravity to ultimately offer hope in visions bright as a blazing hearth.
I live for good snail mail days. I either rush out to the mailbox when I hear the mail truck scoot away, or bat my eyelashes and lazily ask of my husband (headed out to a drum gig or errand), “Will you puh-lease check the mail? If there’s anything fun, will you bring it inside?” [...]
On a day when I am overwhelmed and cannot think of a single thing to write about, the cabbage presents a challenge to tell the world that the writer is never at a loss.
From Good: The Joys of Absorption. Therein lies the key to my love of Power Yoga. I am told not to think. I am absorbed. This wondrous vacation from my head is also why I love writing. Sounds counter-intuitive, I know. But in an essay, “Why Write?” Alan Shapiro nails this addictive sensation mid-essay. He [...]
From The Believer: Dancing About Architecture. I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a [...]
From the LA Times: The Truth About Writers. But we writers have a secret. We don’t spend much time writing. There. It’s out. Writers, by and large, do not do a great deal of writing. We may devote a large number of hours per day to writing, yes, but very little of that time is [...]
From Prospect: Cut-and-paste writing. I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste. But authors have long written quotations on index cards. My system simply makes it easier to move virtual index cards around. The old techniques of pinning cards on a cork bulletin board, or [...]
From the NY Times Book Review: Can’t. Stop. Writing. I’ve consoled myself by noting that the “prolific” tag puts me in some good, if otherwise unlikely, company – that of Joyce Carol Oates, for instance (more than 100 books in 45 years). Has anyone in recent decades been able to review her work without mentioning [...]