Among The Jumbled Heap

More of Andre on Writing

I am currently obsessed with Andre Dubus. He is a contemporary American Short Story writer. A heckuva talented writer and a great human. I'll write more on him later, but I can't resist throwing out some of his good quotes on writing. An older writer knows what a younger one has not yet learned. What is demanding and fulfilling is writing a single word, trying to write le mot juste, as Flaubert said; writing several of them, which become a sentence. When a writer does that, day after d...

The Joan Didion Talent Search

Joan Didion is like my older, sarcastic, world-weary sister. Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is reading the diary of my sister. I see the workings of her mind; I hear the depth of her words, her feelings on the loss of my brother-in-law, her spouse of 40 years. These are things Joan never says at the family reunion. These are the thoughts she ruminates on while sitting in the corner of our grandparents living room, smiling while the family small talks. When reading the work of a si...

Twenty Tippled Years From Today

Looking at journals as I prepare to move, I came across this sonnet I wrote some time in '97 or '98. Forgot I used to write sonnets. Twenty tippled years from today, sitting On a rough hewn and slatted porch, musing With a mason jar in hand and sipping Gin with a ragged smile, grown more puckered By the years of smoke filled neglect and kisses Stolen between odd jobs assigned to me By my comrade, my patron, Saint Golious, Twenty tippled years and I will think about you. Twenty years ...

Nugget of Wisdom from Andre

"Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup. We know the function of a cup, and we drink from it, wash it, put it on a shelf, and it remains a thing we own and control, unless it slips from our hands into the control of gravity; or unless someone else breaks it, or uses it to give us poisoned tea. A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book she...

Greying Temples, Thinning Hair, Salman Rushdie

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: "I don't like the guy." Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he w...