Bits & Pieces

Buddy the Poetry Cat was happy to see me and he showed this by looking up when I came in the door, and then going back to sleep. Probably he was examining his life. He's a big Henry James fan.

There's an interview with yours truly on a site called Long Story Short. Some of the same stuff as was revealed in the gig on Saturday, minus the poems of course. But it might be interesting -- I tend to lie to interviewers, and then forget what I say. In a recent Biographical Note in a literary magazine I wrote that I was an unpublished writer living in North Dakota and working on a saga. Nothing makes me wearier than those solipsistic entries listing every forthcoming poem and a Kerouac-like life as fisherman, rock climber, cook, and towering dwarf.

I have to say that I get as much out of the residency as any student. I can use the T.A. Barron list of deepest fears/highest hopes/etc. even though I'm not a fantasy writer and even though he bored the pants off me on graduation day. Flash Fiction is fun, and I'll always pick up Poetry when I spy it standing on the side of the road in the rain. But there's nothing like a long piece --two or three or four pages a day every day. All I need now is an idea and a Bic pen.

Congratulations again to the grads and welcome to the newbies.