If you feel lost, overwhelmed, confused, drowned, or frustrated in a Newhem class, ask yourself: 1. Could this be Newhem’s plan? Does he want me to ask these very questions I’m asking myself about the subject matter? Could it be that if I’m asking fundamental questions about the subject matter and the reading material, and […]

In 2004, almost exactly two years after my Uncle Mike’s death, he gave me some excellent advice. I’ll explain. We’d set up a scholarship in his name at my college, and I’d just announced the second annual recipient at a ceremony. I’d told the audience the scholarship honored my uncle, who’d dedicated his life to […]

I spend a great deal of my life – the majority of my waking hours, and quite a few of my sleeping ones – fastidiously attempting to control language. I (infamously) employ words like “absquatulate” when nothing else will do. This is what pays my mortgage, and it’s also my calling, so I lucked out. […]

Part 3 Maybe it’s apocryphal, as I’ve been arguing in the previous two posts, but experts claim it started in the messy inkpots of Mesopotamia, and now it appears that it’s finally reached the gilded McMansions of Eight Mile, which really fucks things up for me (as a devotee of hip-hop)—not to mention our youth […]

Part 2 As you probably detected from my previous posting, I don’t truck much with the whiny, “blocked” writer’s complaints. “The easiest thing to do on earth is not write,” says William Goldman, who somehow managed to write the movies Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, The Princess Bride, […]

Part 1 No, Virginia, you lazy whore—there’s no such thing as Writer’s Block. Writer’s Block’s the fairy-tale bastard child of limp, fearful weenies and too-tight pussies. If you want to write, fucking write. Otherwise, as Cliff Garner (First Inkling’s curmudgeonly co–editor) reminds us, “They’re hiring at the car wash.” Having said that, when you believe […]

“Excrement!” This from John Keating, the radical teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989). He’s maligning the fictional but damn plausible J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D., arbiter of excellent poetry. “We’re not laying pipe,” Keating insists, “… How can you describe poetry like American Bandstand—‘Well, I like Byron – I give him a […]

When I was a “yoot,” I yearned to become a Hollywood stuntman like “Hooper,” as portrayed by the genial ham actor, Burton Reynolds, Jr. But in the second grade, after snapping many fine bones in the spokes of my BMX, I settled on writing as a viable future career less likely to maim me. But […]

As I’ve worked on my latest book, and the First Inkling staff has slaved over the slush pile pursuing the next Amy Hempel, some Associate Editors and writers have asked me recently about the “industry” to which they aspire: Well, here it is: Publishing is not dead, but neither is Kirk Douglas. It’s hard to believe either […]