Archive | Book Matters

Love Lost, Love Laureate: Noel Visitations

I woke thinking about Donald Hall, who died last June at the age of 89 after living a very fine life as a poet and a New Englander. There are details of his biography that make me wince, especially his string of very, very young girlfriends. That string included his second wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, who was decades his junior and whom he met while she was still his student.

Though it’s unmodern to think so, Goddess is not always concerned with such details, and in this case Jane and Donald’s love helped them develop as humans and writers. He was wildly proud of his wife’s artistic development, which outstripped his before she succumbed to a voracious cancer a few weeks shy of her 48th birthday. Continue Reading →

A Wolf in Red Lipstick

How I feel

I’m nearing the finish line of the first draft of my book and it’s filling me with a terrible anxiety. I’ve gone totally broke while writing this. I’m unearthed stories about my past that irrevocably have changed my present and maybe my future. Some alliances haven’t survived; others have formed or reformed. And there are so many questions I’ve put off until now: Will anyone give a fuck about this story? being the first and foremost.

Continue Reading →

White Flags in the Literary Tunnel

Exposed lady (Milton Avery)

I’ve been a stuck author for weeks. The following quote, from Philip Roth no less, is giving me strength by endorsing my surrender. It’s good to know my darkness can shed real light. Goddess let it be so.

You’re looking, as you write, for what’s going to resist you. You’re looking for trouble. Sometimes uncertainty arises not because the writing is difficult, but because it isn’t difficult enough. Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy