SAN FRANCISCO, CA-

Does Nick Cave know about my love life?

I found out my wife was cheating on me. Not the greatest feeling in the world after a decade of marriage. I admit, there were times when I met another attractive woman and thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just…but I put that thought right out of my mind and went home a committed guy.

Not that sex was the only thing to the petit mess that our marriage was. There was me, the writer, and what she thought the writing life style would bring her.

When we dated, I was the quirky artist guy. She thought listening to Nirvana made her alternative and Nora Roberts was literature. (more…)

HOUSTON, TX-

Pierre Bayard’s ode to philistinism, Comment Parler des Livres que l’on n’a pas Lus, or How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read is a unique experience. Upon completion of Bayard’s work (one wonders if Bayard himself ever read his own book), I found myself first outraged, then confused, and finally, a little constipated. I thought to myself, “How does this boorish Frenchman claim that a perfunctory flip-through of Anna Karenina should suffice for an understanding of St. Petersburg’s high society during that time—or Jasper, Missouri’s, home to the Double Deuce for that matter?” Can this Bayard be serious? Can we really talk—intelligently—about books we’ve never read?

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NEW PALTZ, N.Y.-

Today is the official release date of Totally Killer, my first novel.

That’s what my oh-so-brief bio leads you to believe, anyway. “This is his first novel,” it says, as if I’d suddenly decided, after floundering about for the first thirty-five years of my life, to bang out a book, and a few months later, voilà.

As Hemingway concluded in his first novel, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” (more…)

BEND, OR-

I have learned many things over the past few months of book touring. Number one, grabbing a book-buying audience’s attention in the summer months is like convincing me that Dan Brown, or Stephen King, is a good writer. Number two, if you read in a venue where they make maple-bacon doughnuts, they will come. Number three, there is no other bookstore like Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO-

What if you were lucky enough to be a fly on the wall at a publishing house marketing meeting?  Or, barring that, a junior intern seated not at the table, but in the second tier of chairs, where your job was to serve coffee to the big boys and girls.  Well then, you’d be privy to some really good insider information on what was hot and what was not, wouldn’t you?  Well I know such a person and she called this in to me the other night, so I thought I’d share. 

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NASHVILLE, TN.-

The engineer leaned back in his seat, shades on in a cold dark room, still very Cali though he’d been in Nashville well over a year. He worked awhile with Rubin, some other big dogs before most of the industry dried up or moved to Music City.

“Yo, you’re a Beastie fan huh?” he asked me.

“Oh yeah, sure.”

“Check this out,” he said, easing up the slider marked vol til weak beats and sub-par Fatboys style raps thumped clumsily around the room.

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SEATTLE, WA-

This is a list of my most memorable moments from grade school, by year.

I stole this idea from Erika Rae, partially because it’s a good idea and she did it well, and also partially because I’m partial to lists. Lists are cool.

Kindergarten–My memory’s fuzzy. I think I read a lot of dinosaur books.

First Grade–I raced J_______ to be the first one to finish each assignment. Occasionally it came down to who could run to the teacher’s desk faster. I was a total nerd (and still am).

Second Grade–I cut my finger and blood was running everywhere, but I was too shy to ask for help. For a while, I hid it under my construction paper. Eventually, the teacher saw blood and took over. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO-

I’ve been thinking a lot about book titles lately. My first published book (not the first book I’d written, but the first I’d sold), Calling Crow, had originally been titled by me as Cacique. Envisioned as a historical thriller, ala Clavell’s Shogun, I put a lot of thought into the title.

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LOS ANGELES, CA-

There is no point to this. The point is that I’m getting sick. I just noticed it an hour ago. Suddenly I am blowing my nose. Out of nowhere. And now feeling a little wonky. So I took some vitamin C and ate about 14 pounds of sautéed spinach and now I am sitting here waiting to die. If the pig flu gets me tell them I was an okay guy. Kind of quiet and not very good at tennis, but basically decent.
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TULSA, OK-

The first memory I have of my father is my earliest image of anything, a thunderous voice demanding I finish some long-forgotten meal. I was still in a high chair then, and the world was binary, black and white, yes or no. Mostly no. If you were uncertain about whether a particular action was permissible, you didn’t have to wait long to find out. The loud voice made the world exceedingly simple.

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NEAR 91 DEGREES LONGITUDE-

I don’t remember giving consent. Or protesting. Or having a choice, not with adult forces at work. A secret committee decided that I should represent my elementary school at the Little Miss Lafayette pageant. How I got the news, I’m not sure, but my guess is this:

My mother: “Ronlyn, you’re going to be in a beauty pageant. You were picked out of everyone from the whole school. Isn’t that wonderful?”

Me: I likely scowled. I likely pondered the real threat of dress-up clothes. It’s possible I asked, “Why me?”

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Dear DFW:

One year ago today, you put a rope around your neck and willingly jumped.

For me, the void was immense for weeks on end. Due to academic obligations at the time, I was never really able to deal with it properly, which, of course, is kind of odd because I never met you.

But it remained there for a good half year, and I had to come to grips with the fact that you, my favorite writer —and ironically the only one whose writing made me feel like I should never even really try to write because it seemed like you had said it all— were dead.

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SAN FRANCISCO-

I sent one of my stories to a so-called literary magazine and got back the strangest rejection letter I’ve ever received — and I’ve been doing this for over thirty years. I’d never heard of The @$$!@# Reader until the night I picked up (but didn’t buy) a copy at my local Borders where I go with my daughter, D, every Wednesday afternoon. (more…)

AMHERST, MA -

Yesterday, in my Fiction II class, as the students introduced themselves I asked them to speak about what they’d been reading over the summer. One student impressively admitted to reading both Underworld and Infinite Jest. Another, though, shyly said she was reading YA novels.

“I suspect they’re more fun,” she said.

“To read or to write,” I asked.

“Both,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I think it has something to do with what Doris Lessing said once about 20th century literature, that it was a long cry of pain.” (more…)

NEWPORT COAST, CA -

I have participated in a number of political demonstrations, but few as memorable as the March for Women’s Lives in 2004.  More than 1.15 million people converged on the mall for the largest march on Washington in U.S. history.  Organizers jammed more than 100 speakers into the program; exemplary speeches demanding access to contraception, sex education, global family planning, and choice.

 But what I am starting here—it is not the memory of a massive protest, or a recollection of the Bush Administration’s use of women’s rights as a political bargaining tool.  Writers do this. We begin with something approachable, something we trust we might get onto the page or screen correctly.  We try for a moment to hold the story in our heads, even as we know we have to let it go. 

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SOUTH COAST, ENGLAND-

At some point in 2007 the number of people telling me to do stand up comedy began to outweigh the number of people who didn’t care to admit that I was a walking laugh factory.

I was pretty on during 2007, to the point I managed to impress people with my wit; not girls of course, no, still too ugly for that, but people who weren’t obligated as relatives to laugh.

A lot of it came from beating the bastards to whatever aspect of my crater-faced physicality was being made fun of that day.

One day it was the big red spot on my nose.

”Your nose looks like a traffic light” somebody wise cracked.

”Where’s the green light?!” another laughed.

And for reasons I can only explain as superb comic timing, I put my right index finger in my nose and pulled out a juicy green globule.

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LOWER EAST SIDE, MANHATTAN-

I recently finished The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, by David Schields. As the title suggests, it’s a kind of essay/meditation/memoir about getting old. What the title doesn’t tell you is that in it, Schields addresses at length his relationship with his father.

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BALTIMORE, MD-

You might remember my mother, Bonnie Blau, from the interview I did with her about a year ago.  We talked about the fact that she thinks she looks like Bruce Springsteen.  You can read that interview here.  As a follow up, here’s an interview with my mother where I ask her about one of my favorite photos.  It’s the only picture I have of me as a little kid with my mother.

Do you remember where this photo was taken?

It was taken by your dad in Watertown, Massachusetts. 

What was that time of life like for you? 

It was nice.  We lived in a nice place.  All our friends were the same age and had children the same age. And life was pretty simple.  We didn’t have any money but life was simple because taking care of kids is simple.  And everyone was in the same situation so it was one of those nice situations.  If I needed someone to take care of you, someone would come over.  And the kids could go in and out and run outside.  Although you didn’t go out much, you mostly stayed with me.  And when you went out you took off all your clothes.  You were bad.  You were good, but funny.  It was a nice time of life.  Everyone was equal.  There was one family the Dugans* that lived two houses down.  They were kind of out of place because he was an alcoholic and

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LOS ANGELES—

Growing up working-class in a small Southern city, I early acquired a racist vocabulary. This was by no means encouraged by my parents, who were mortified when, at four or so, I referred to a fellow customer at Sears as a nigger. I have no memory of doing that — I was told about it years later — but I’m sure I was baffled by the punishment I received. The kids in my neighborhood used the word “nigger” as a matter of course. To them, it was an appropriate term for a person of color, and I followed suit, even after the Sears incident. Why punish someone for calling a bird a bird? And why would a bird object? So, I think, my reasoning went.
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BROOKLYN, NY-

A recent hangover found me still under the covers at 2:00 PM. I called out to my boyfriend Casey, but instead of asking for water or Advil, I asked him to look up details about the murder of Konerak Sinthasomphone, Jeffrey Dahmer’s thirteenth victim.

From under my pillow I’d been half-listening to Casey talk about the death of Ted Kennedy. Casey is young enough that Ted’s incident at Chappaquiddick, in the news once more, was a revelation. He was reading aloud about the crash from my desk across the room, and it got me thinking about the guilt one must feel when responsible for the death of another human. That in turn made me remember that after Jeffrey Dahmer was caught, reports surfaced about a fourteen year-old boy who had briefly escaped him. (more…)