Spent the weekend with my oldest friend from my MFA days. Twenty-seven years later and we still howl about the biggest assholes in our program. When you’re talking about an MFA in poetry, there’s a lot of competition. And to think, all we were doing was writing verse. Given the behaviors, you’d think we were hedge fund managers or General Managers. Why are poets so difficult? Mental illness? Small penises? Financial insecurity? The world’s indifference?
Tell us about a poet.
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I didn’t get a chance to write last night because I was drilling my kid on the American Revolution until I fell into a coma. I have to say I think school really sucks. I was reminded of how I used to feel dead walking down the locker-lined halls of my high school. My history teacher’s hair was chlorine-bleached from coaching the swim team. He was the type to perch on a desk in an effort to appear casual and caring (these were the Welcome Back Kotter Days). I often day dreamed about the girl who day dreamed in her seat by the window, her face pale with a sheen of oil, her boots like an elf’s. I also remember feeling agitated by the boys in the class and their flushed faces, some with scruff, their bigness and loudness. We had to made a chart of our lives, a history, and everyone brought in large pieces of cardboard sloppily decorated with baby pictures up to the present. One boy, Roland, had a circular graph of his brain. I still think about him for no good reason.
I’ve slept with a few writers and I have to recommend it. Yes, they’re self-involved. Yes, they will take the best of you and use it in their next short story. Yes, they can be just as awful as non-writing men. But, it’s still worth if you’re seduced by words, by romance, by a guy who can talk about an Alice Munro story while frying an egg. Their sensitivity can be sublime. Their narcissism genius. Mystery and thriller writers are reliable. Poets are grateful. Journalists will eat in bed. Novelists take their time. It’s probably better to sleep with a writer before they get too famous. You know what fame can do to people.
TOP TEN REASONS TO LIVE WITH A WRITER
Today is the publication date of my husband’s first novel, 
If I hear one more person say that YA is the hottest category I am going to strangle myself (forget that after I get my script off my hands I’m turning to a YA novel I started a year ago after a publisher contacted me because she loved the blog and wondered if I ever thought of trying to write one. I lied and said I had). And, I confess, I just bought a copy of Hunger Games. I didn’t go near Harry Potter or Twilight, but when I heard that kids killed kids in Hunger Games, I confess I was curious. The YA books of my youth: Go Ask Alice, Flowers for ALgernon, David and Lisa, The Butterfly Revolution, THe Outsiders, Of Mice and Men, In This SIgn, and purloined copies of The Godfather. Now apparently there are hundreds of series about mean girls, rich girls, blonde girls, and undead girls. Go girls!
It’s Oscar weekend. Usually my favorite night of the year from the first Blahnik on the red carpet to the last acceptance speech cut short for going over time. But this year I’m not in the mood. Maybe it’s because they had to borrow a host from the wax museum, or because there isn’t a single piece of bombast that will sweep the night, or maybe it’s because I’m bitter not be nominated for my screenplay that didn’t get made into a movie. I remember the first time someone I loved broke up with me. I knew I had a vital choice to make: to be bitter or to be happy that I had known great love.
There’s a lunch ritual in New York publishing that is elaborate, byzantine, and requires the skill of a master chess player. It’s called the Cancellation and Rescheduling Shuffle and here is how it’s played. First, you must know a real invitation from a lunch gesture. A gesture comes in the form of a business card clipped to a book with a hand scrawled: Lunch? Or a p.s. at the bottom of an email: let’s do lunch. Don’t be fooled; these are not invitations. They are hollow gestures. They are guys who take your number at a bar and never call. By contrast, the Cancellation and Rescheduling Shuffle (CARS) begins with a bonafide lunch date, which can be cancelled by either party. Pawn to queen four. Some of the excuses might be: sick child, author in from out of town, had the wrong date in my calendar. But the excuse is secondary. Who cares if you have to get a bunion removed, a therapy session, a meeting with your wedding planner. What’s important is that you make a new date with absolutely no intention of keeping it. Pawn to Queen’s Bishop Four. And if you’re skilled you can postpone a lunch date for a year. Check. Which gets you bonus points and the opportunity to convert CARS to a game of chicken where the person who bails first loses. 
For me, the whole thing is editing. Yes, I love discovering a mushroom under a rock, yes I love hearing the words, “we would like to make an offer,” yes, going to lunch with handsome young editors who might still change the world is lovely, but it’s the pencil in my hand, turning my mechanical pencil a smidge and writing a note in the margin, or untangling a sentence, or offering a more precise word that I find endlessly satisfying. I love thinking about pacing, tone, and timing. I love taking the back off a watch.
Betsy Lerner 