I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues

So I’m flipping through the New Yorker while enjoying a frozen Amy’s lasagna for dinner when I come upon a picture of the late Maurice Sendak standing in the woods dressed in a black robe and holding a cane that could double as wizard’s staff looking like a little Jewish wizard or a scary cult [...]

So I Turned Myself to Face Me

I’m curious about the moments in your life when you made huge decisions about your writing life. To first share your work, to first send it out, to apply to a writing program or conference, to talk to a famous writer. To take a year off to write. To take a mindless job that wouldn’t impinge [...]

When You’re Sure You’ve Had Enough

Today I had an attack. This is when I walk by a bookstore and can’t go it. Can’t. Go. In. I know that if I see the front table offerings, all the books beautifully stacked in their best back to school clothes, and the darling shelf talkers with their lovely cursive print, and the shelves [...]

I May Be Mad I May Be Blind

On our company website, each of the agents has a paragraph about the kinds of book we are looking for. In mine, I wrote that I like the “hard to categorize,” which I thought was a clever way of saying that I’m quirky, that I think outside the vag, that I welcome misfits, eccentrics, lunatics [...]

It’s a Thin Line Between Love and Hate

Well, I’m not one for holidays, let alone Hallmark card holidays, but I did quite enjoy mother’s day this year. It started with a text from my fifteen year old filled with many colorful emoticons and ended with burning a tic off my dog and folding three loads of laundry with all socks present and [...]

He Who Does Not Feel Me Is Not Real To Me

I’ve often talked about the peak moment in an agent’s life when he gets to tell a writer that there is an offer. What I’ve not written about is all the rejection any agent has to shoulder  on behalf of his or her clients, and how those rejections get processed. For  me, they only make [...]

I’m Ready To Go Anywhere

Do you think before you write? Or do think as you write? Or do you write first and think later? Or do you write to figure out what you’re thinking. Do you write in your head? In full sentences or fragments? When I was young I would say, I just write. ANd what I meant [...]

Sometimes When We Touch The Honesty’s Too Much

What is true? What is real? What is authentic? What if I told that the story about the little girl having a meltdown at the bus stop was a fiction, if I made it up, or if I only witnessed the mother grimly walking off the bus and fabricated the rest? Would you feel I [...]

He Sees Angels in the Architecture

This morning while I was driving to the gym, I saw a little girl, maybe six or seven, refuse to get on the bus. Her mother picked her up to put her on the bus, but the girl thrashed so violently that the mother had to step back off the bus, nearly losing her balance. [...]

Get Me Jesus On the Line

If you’ve been reading the blog for any length of time, you know that I like nothing more than to have a big fat pity party and invite all my friends.You know I like to wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t been kicked out of film school, if I hadn’t fallen [...]