When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
I met with six writers and talked about who they are, why they write, and what their work feels like. We looked at twenty pages and found some themes, some clunkers, some wonderful adjectives and transitions, some bloat, some moments of truth, some wit, and some duck duck goose. I wondered what they did after our meetings. Starbucks? Laptop? The Affair? I wondered what it meant. I thought about my hideous graduate school days, depression in full force. Dancing on the line. Did anyone ask me? Did I tell anyone? I loved these students for their life. Their sweet life. One young man wore three necklaces strung on lengths of leather. Totems from another life, a feather from India made of bone. I fell back in love with the writing life.
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Betsy Lerner 
Stock photos of models should come with trigger warnings…
I remember the days when books didn’t have author photos . I’m just a schlubby guy in jeans and an Oxford shirt who knows the alchemy of making sentences into people, people who are stronger and more graceful and more capable than I ever was. If I have to audition for the Sundance catalog at the same time, I guess I’m out. I’d rather write than accessorize; my little green and white avatar, with its whirling, dynamic symmetry, suits me just fine.
The writing life is a sham. The writer is a ghost. The words exist on their own, better than I.
Damn, herb.
My writing life is a sliver of another. Some stories will never see the page.
Ha, the writing life? What the hell is that but a picture painted in the mind of a dreamer.
Whoa, and I said that on half a cup of coffee. I wonder what I’ll turn out if I down the rest and have another.
BTW if I wore a black tank top I’ll look like the oil tank in my basement.
Yup, Carolynn Pianta is actually me Carolynnwith2Ns. Only way I could make it here was by being the real me. Scary huh.
A rainy night in Oklahoma, 1977. I was on the road and found shelter from the storm in Woody Guthrie’s boyhood home in Okemah. I thought it would be a shrine, a museum, but it was just a broken shack with rotted floors and shattered windows. Graffiti on the walls, some paying tribute to Woody, messages and poems, other sections were just drawings of dicks and pussies and the word FUCK with a backwards F. I played guitar, badly, and watched 3 simultaneous lightning strikes illuminate the hills. I lit a candle and wrote in my little memo book, jotting down what we’d now call tweets. It was a quiet and lonely time and I wrote. Forty years later, I remember that night and I still write. Maybe my next project will be a book of tweets I’ll title “Canary”.
Wow. (Random aside: Now I understand the title of the Son Volt album.)
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!