In-between-projects jitters. Everything tastes like Diet Pepsi. Can’t find anything. Waiting for the weather to change. Invited to twenty parties, going to none. The dog is hiding in the blue room. I have 38 letters from a high school lover. I have 17 boxes of pictures and ticket stubs and photo booth strips and post cards. My computer is nine years old. I just got a check for $700. I have friends I don’t call. I play bridge in the middle of the night with strangers from all over the world. I have an idea. It’s vague and involves love.

What you got?

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When I was a lost and deeply depressed graduate student at Columbia University, I had the great good fortune of having a poetry workshop with Denis Johnson. I had read his first collection of poetry, The Incognito Lounge, many times, usually at my favorite cafe in the west village. He was gorgeous, his voice sonorous. During our first class, he seemed to be having some kind of panic attack because he couldn’t speak. And when a student kept hounding him, he fled to the bathroom. I fled the program a few months later. I wrote to Denis Johnson and told him that I was hospitalized and something of what I was going through. Some months later, he replied. He encouraged me to get well and go back to school if I wanted to. He encouraged the school to take me back. Most of all he encouraged me to keep writing. When he died earlier this week, I had a vision of him sitting in Riverside Park watching the silky waters of the Hudson go by.

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Thanks for all the great suggestions. The clock is ticking down. Now I want to be really petty. Shocking, I know. Lately I’ve been getting what I consider to be specious fan letters. They are from people who claim to love my writing, love The Bridge Ladies, love love love. Then, because they love me so much and feel so connected to my writing, they want to share theirs with MOI. One person wrote, “I think you’d make a great agent for me.” Another said, “because I love your writing so much, I’m hoping that you will love mine.” I think it irritates me so much because I just want to be like other writers, not a writer-pimp, which is I guess what I am.

Does anyone else around here have an identity crisis when it comes to being “a writer?”

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I’m going on vacation next week and the contemplation of what books to bring begins. I don’t use a Kindle or anything like that, so the selection of 4-5 books is a high wire act. There’s airplane reading, sitting in a London Park reading, reading on trains, in cafes, in bed. There’s the pull toward classics, the curiosity of the contemporary, the prize winners. I want to read Kay Redfield Jamison’s book on Lowell, but it’s a big boy. I’m also halfway through a couple of books, do I bring or leave them behind with their pouty faces?

Any recommendations?

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In a hotel, watching morning TV, waiting to give a book talk at a synagogue in Philadelphia. The thought pops into my mind: why am I alive, how many years have I been on Lithium, why can’t I remember the middle of the only poem I had committed to memory? Why is my dress tight? Why am I wearing a dress? Why isn’t my movie screening at the Tribeca Film Festival no matter that I don’t have a movie. Why do I always flood the bathroom?

HOw’s your morning going?

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When you finish a piece of writing, I recommend: printing it out, reading it aloud, make notes with a pencil, input the changes, put the pages in the potato bin for ten days to two weeks.  Reread, delete 2-10,000 words, read a major Russian novel, ask a trusted reader for feedback (no first degree relatives or people you’re fucking). Ask another reader. Revise again, read out loud again, potato bin, writer’s workshop or retreat. Find a therapist.

What do you do when you finish something?

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What do people mean when they talk about voice? For me, the first book I ever read that screamed voice was Catcher in the Rye. Then I discovered the confessional poets whose voices I loved. Is voice only first person? Is voice quirky, inflected, blood-soaked, ironic, quixotic, besotted, divided?  Junot Diaz, David Sedaris. How does it suffuse third person or omniscient narrators. Through tone, detail, pacing, revelation.

Can you teach voice, develop it, find it?

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In the last few weeks, more than one writer has mentioned that he or she is working on something “just for themselves,” “no pressure,” “a totally different genre,” etc. I get it. It’s the desire to write in obscurity, which is ironic since the desire to come out of obscurity is so overpowering before you get your work out there. It’s a desire to protect the creative process, to stop second guessing what the market, agents, editors think. When writing ceases to be fun and by fun I mean rewarding, you need to reboot. I still think that the person writing just for him or herself still hopes the work will be met with open arms. What am I saying? You can run but you can’t hide.

Where do you go to hide?

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Now that I’m officially not working on a writing project, I want to talk about how it feels. It feels fucking great. My skin is clear, my nails are manicured, I’m sleeping again. I don’t know how I ever wrote at all. It’s so hard. LOL. Seriously, if you told me I had to write another book right now I would start crying and never stop.

How the fuck do you do it?

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I’ve spent the last year having mother daughter conversations at libraries, bookstores, Jewish Centers and bridge clubs. Last week, I was on a panel with three other writers talking about mommy memoirs. I could have hit myself in the face with a hanger. This post is dedicated to my dad. I credit him with everything I know about business and my love of movies, Broadway, stars and salty food. He would have preferred me to get an MBA instead of an MBA, but when I started acquiring books he was always thrilled to see my name in the acknowledgments of books I had worked on. He would literally show the acknowledgments to anyone who visited our house.

Was your dad proud of your writing, you?

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