To Quote Bukowski: "The days run away like wild horses over the hills."

I feel negligent, having started this blog, and having ignored it since the demands of teaching have taken me over. I hope someone is still tuning in. 

I work on my play, set in Baltimore, about prostitutes who want to get off the street. I recently made contact again with the agency that allowed me to shadow them a few years ago. They serve the prostitute population by providing water, condoms, clothes, showers, hot meals, and counseling, if someone wants counseling. So I have a contact there who will ask the women anything I require. I feel blessed by their willingness to share. The theater department at Purdue has offered to stage a reading of the first few scenes. This spurs me on. 

Yet, the holiday season is nearly upon us. And I do plan to take time off to play with the children in my life. 

I will do my best to keep posting HOME PLATE. 

GOING AWAY SHOES by Jill McCorkle

Read this book! Jill McCorkle will make you laugh, and you will ruefully recognize some hard truths about love, marriage, and family. I'm blitzing through it way too fast, and will be sad to see it end. 

I mentioned to a former student that I am writing a play. He said, "Oh, that sounds good. I'm so tired of describing things." I had to laugh. Eventually after writing nothing but dialogue, though, I long desirously for prose, prose, paragraphs of lyrical rumination, tiny tidbits of character. What's in a woman's purse, under her bed. The grass is, truly, almost always greener. 

LOVE AND SUMMER

Yesterday Rita Rud told me that she received William Trevor's new novel as a birthday gift. I went immediately to Von's to purchase the book. LOVE AND SUMMER. She said that she recalls something he said in an interview: before he writes a scene, he writes out everything the character did that day. He needs to know every little thing before he can cut back and write the scenes that matter to the novel. Some people do this in their minds. Some writers keep a notebook with tidbits of the character's day. But I have never heard of this strategy and it makes sense. The problem is that many, if not most, writers do not want to waste time and they would see such pre-writing as a waste of time. It's obviously working for William Trevor who has published 13 novels, 2 novellas, 12 collections of stories, 2 non-fiction books, and 1 children's book. He is 81 years old. It seems a shame to me that many of the young writers I know (by young I mean 40 and under) are not interested in William Trevor's work. I'm not sure why. He writes about love, desire, disappointment, regret, societal norms and the secret fights against those norms, fate. And as Elizabeth Stuckey-French says: He has a wonderful sense of the absurd. There is so much to learn from reading his work; there is so much pure enjoyment to be had. LOVE AND SUMMER starts off deliciously, with a young orphan girl married off to an older man. 

I Await Certain Pieces

We have reviews coming soon for Pamela Uschuk's book of poems, Debra Sparks' book GOOD FOR THE JEWS, and that essay by Elizabeth Stuckey-French on using Tarot cards to build characters. If you, dear reader of the blog, have an idea for an essay or a book you would like to see reviewed herein, please contact me. 

I finished the copyedits for a story coming out in THE NORMAL SCHOOL. The edits were tricky -- some tense changes and re-working of sentences. It was a puzzle to solve and I hope we solved it in a way that serves the story. I am always grateful for copy editors. It makes me happy to have a story coming out. It is a youthful feeling -- I can remember the first time my poems were published in a little magazine that came out of Hopkins in Baltimore -- THE CHARLES STREET REVIEW. I lived in a basement apartment then on St. Paul Street and worked downtown at Enoch Pratt Public Library. It was thrilling. The world of little magazines -- how they thrive, and with what beauty and devotion -- never ceases to amaze me. Going to AWP in worth the book fair. It dazzles the eye and overwhelms. 

Do you have a little magazine you love? Please write a comment and tell us about it. 

If you're reading HOME PLATE, I have posted 2 new chapters. 

What constitutes benign neglect?

Many years ago I heard Ursula LeGuin interviewed on the radio. I had read only one of her books, but I was interested in her life partly because I had lived a few doors from her house near Forest Park in Portland, Oregon, many years before. The interviewer asked her how she managed to be so prolific with young children in the house. And she said, "Benign neglect." 

Now I find myself wondering about how to separate from my animals long enough to be productive. This may sound silly to those people who don't have animals. But those of you who share this issue, you know who you are. I have decided to avoid eye contact with my dogs while I'm writing. This may entail shutting them out of my writing room, but I hope not. 

Women with children or animals: how do you make space for your work? 

I'm reading the fall issue of GLIMMER TRAIN. Last night I read an admirable ghost story in that issue by Sean Padraic McCarthy. Titled "Preservation." It's about a guy whose wife dies in an accident and leaves him with three little girls to raise. There was a tinge of Andre Dubus, the elder, about the story. Very good story. GLIMMER TRAIN never fails me when I want a good story.