In 1991, as a newly minted editor at Houghton Mifflin in my Ann Taylor suits, pearls and pumps, I acquired my first book of short stories, Naked to the Waist, by a writer with the most alluring name, Alice Elliott Dark. The collection was followed by In the Gloaming, the title story of which would be included in John Updike’s Best Short Stories of the Century, and then the novel, Think of England. In addition to her brilliant writing, Alice is a beloved teacher, and she is antithetical to everything I believe to be true about writers. In other words, she’s caring, kind, and believes people can grow. Here’s her guest post:
I teach in an MFA program, which is for writers what waitressing is for actresses. (Yes, I insist on sticking to the woman version of these words.) It’s that job that seems a perfect complement to the central task of writing but is actually all consuming. I have learned over the years that it is fruitless to work on a novel during the semester; I cannot keep it all in my head, and I begin to doubt it. That’s when the trouble starts.
This semester I wrote a novella by not writing my novel. I wrote a story. I wrote a bunch of poems. I focused so intently on not writing my novel that I wrote lots of other stuff. I went to my office at the uni at seven-thirty and wrote for a few hours before anyone else rolled in. Ha! A simple plan, yet it worked. Kind of like giving up processed foods.
As soon as I finish grading exams, I will have three weeks. THREE WEEKS. This calls for a master plan—and I do have one. Here it is, step by step.
1) I wrote very detailed lists of everything I have to do before next semester begins, and how long it is going to take to do each task. I hung them on the bulletin board in my office and will next look at them on January 15th.
2) I made an agreement with my writing coach to work on two things and two things only during this time, three hours per day each.
3) I agreed to do yoga before I begin each writing sesh, and breathing exercises.
4) Instead of watching TV at night, I am going to read the books I will be teaching next semester. This is obviously the hardest commitment.
5) No Facebook. Or just a little Facebook.
6) Keep Aristotle’s Poetics at my elbow.
7) Plan the days around the blocks of writing time.
8) Go work at my office when my son is home.
9) No computer until I have a clean draft in pencil.
10) Focus on what I am not writing, so I can write. That seems to work.
How will I survive the actual friends n’ family moments? Work them into the other 18 hours of the day.
So, the question: what’s your plan?
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Please welcome our resident flaneur and bon vivant, author the forthcoming illustrated travel memoir, Le Road Trip, our own 
Dear Betsy:
I want to be Bob Dylan. I have the boots. I have the Ray Bans. I’m Jewish. I have a terrible voice. I want to be Alan Ginsberg. I’m capacious. I’m ravenous. I’m short and bald and in love with kaddish. When I walk up the subway stairs my heart breaks for the warped heel on a worn shoe, a life of leaning too much this way or that. When I spoke to the kids at Holy Cross I wondered what my life would have been like if I tried, for just one day, to write full time. I took the road well traveled; has it made a fucking difference? I am kidding myself. Once upon a time you looked so fine. A woman lights a long cigarette as if she were a screen actress from the thirties. A man with a mutt carries a bag of dung in his palm as if it were a sack of gold coins. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! I think I would have gone under the waves had I not found this work, these writers, these pages, and sentences. I should be more grateful.
I was on a panel tonight at The College of Holy Cross. The moderator asked me what I was doing when I was college age and in the few years after. Fucking up, battling depression, gaining and losing tons of weight, having bad affairs, eating cheeseburgers, smoking Marlboro’s, wearing cowboy boots, going to poetry readings, sending mental signals to guys I liked in my literature classes, failing typing tests at major publishing houses, frequenting coffee houses and haunting book stores, alienating friends, stock piling Percodan, and writing bad poems. I know, I’m an inspiration.
If you’ve been checking in here at Forest for the Trees, you know that I am a devout atheist. Today, while walking to the subway, I asked myself how I could be so sure that there’s nothing. In a world of such obvious uncertainty, where did I get my certitude? THen I had the realization that it makes me feel good. And I think it’s why I believe so deeply in art, that it exists in the face of nothing. We need to make food, clothes, shelter, movies. But art, poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, music. It comes into the world like a child, unbidden. Some people believe that they create to honor god, or glorify god. When I look at a Blake I get that. But I’ve also had a similar experience walking through Serra’s tilted walls.
Betsy Lerner 