Letters to a Young, Middle-Aged, or Geezer Writer, XXI

Unless someone close to you has specifically pointed it out, chances are you have not fully articulated to yourself the connection between voices heard in rooms and voices emerging from reading material.

It is a truth universally recognized that in any large room filled with people, there is at least one person whose speaking voice will cause you in some way to come unglued.

You may have first recognized this potential in faculty meetings, or while merely trying to slurp down enough coffee and croissant to secure your waking state.  The phenomenon is also likely to emerge in rest rooms, doctors' office waiting rooms, or ticket lines for motion pictures or sporting events.

The irritating quality of the voice may be various, a rasping nasality, a locution characterized by a tendency to honk, or that most common culprit, the disagreeable timbre reminiscent of hardwood being sawed.  Squeaks and repetitions of some phrase such as you know, you know what I mean?, like, and drill, baby, drill are also contestants.  The overwhelming fact is:  you know an irritating voice when you hear it, to the point that the mere mention here of irritating voice evokes in your inner iPod sufficient response to set your jaw on clench mode, perhaps even your brow to furl in abject disapproval.

Some writers may already have a similar effect on you, explaining why the very mention of them and their work sends you into default negativity.  Thus do I introduce for your consideration the need to transfer the voice you hear as you compose into the material that lands on the page.  If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you haven't read enough or, worse, you haven't read with that investigative focus it is easy to confuse with plagiarism.

I expect to hear from some of you that you are not a hearing person; when you compose you are describing pictures you see of your characters and scenery and emotional landscape doing a ballet before your eyes.  No problem if this is the case.  What you do next is read your work aloud after you believe it is completed.  What you get is your voice--the attitude and effect your work is likely to have on readers fortunate enough to have the opportunity to read your work.

What's that you say; you don't like the way your voice sounds?  Okay, back to the reading gig, searching your search for voices that please you, reach you on some emotional level to the point where you can even venture an opinion why you like the voice.  Notice how that writer mixes sentence length for effect.  Notice how that writer will use short, clipped sentences in tense, action-heavy moments as opposed to thinking things through in leisurely form the way remarkable Jack Benny did when, being accosted by a mugger with a gun who demanded "Your money or your life," responded with an agonizing pause to the point where the mugger said, "Well? (intending the meaning to be What shall it be?), followed by Jack Benny's classic, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking."  Nor is it any accident that Mr. Benny's personal Achilles' Heel was another comedian with a reputation for splendid timing, George Burns.  Voice is timing, pacing, the orchestration of your text to the emotion you wish your text to convey.

And don't tell me you had no idea you were supposed to imbue every scene you write with a dominant emotion.  I don't write letters to young, middle-aged, or geezer writers who have no awareness of that.  I mean seriously, if you wonder why your manuscripts come back unread or with some ominous mark and the notation "I stopped reading here," it is because the reader had struggled to that point feeling nothing but relief at having reached it in order to bail out.

But I digress.  This is about voice, about you sounding like you.  I know it is tempting to want to sound like writers whose names you find on bestseller lists, but stop and think about it for a moment:  They got onto those lists because they not only had a story to tell, they had a particular voice in which to tell it.

Go ahead. Tell Me. I can take it.

How many times have you caught yourself saying to someone--"Go ahead, Tell me. Be perfectly frank."--as it relates to your work? You are reminded of this up-front-frankness syndrome by the number of clients and writers who have put this trope down on the table, because invariably those are the ones who begin to see the shifting tide as you go through your list, finally lapsing into complete, combative defensiveness. It has been some time since you've said this to another, largely because you have grown more confident with your work, even to the point of accepting that there are those who will not under any circumstances like your work.

Today, when you were least feeling like it, thanks to a raging sinus headache, a client was badgering you for the truth and you were thinking this was not a good time for you to give such answers, rather this was a time to tell the client you wanted to direct attention to some anomalies.

"This is not profitable," you said. "There is profit in addressing the need for your characters to sound considerably less like each other and more individual." At which point you were confronted with, "So, you're saying I write lousy dialogue?"

"I'm saying you can enhance your dialogue by making it reflect what the speaker wants>"

"All right, so tell me, who do you think writes powerful dialogue?"

"This is off topic," you say. "You are a client. If we were in a more formal editor writer situation, we'd be having this conversation because I had some thought that the work could do well among readers."

"You're all alike, you guys. No consideration for the writer."

"Actually, we are not alike. Editors differ in their opinions as much as readers do in theirs."

"Fucking Gordon Lish, you think you are," the client says.

"Actually, I wrote a review of one of his collections of short stories and my conclusion was that the Emperor had no clothes."

"All alike, every last one of you."

"The funny thing," you said, " is that not all writers are alike--except the ones who tell you,'Go ahead. Give me some honest feedback. I can take it."

We could conceivably remained standing there for some time, exchanging barrages of "All alike." but as you noted, your headache was something not even the coffee was helping, so you got the hell out of there.

Mon semblance, mon frere h/t Baudelaire

reader, the--the remote individual, unknown to the writer, who will read and react to the writer's work; persons known to the writer who will read the writer's work; individuals who know the writer, and who are also writers, who will read the writer's work; critics or individuals who consider themselves as critics, who will read the writer's work; persons who have some issue with the writer's ethnicity, lifestyle, religion or lack thereof, who will nevertheless read the writer's work; persons in search of artistic and emotional insights who will read the writer's work; individuals who will deliberately or innocently misconstrue the writer's work; persons who will read the writer's work in hopes of evolving their own writing ; persons who will read the writer's work in hopes of finding mistakes the writer has made; individuals who are convinced they can concoct and render better stories than the writer; individuals who are willing to experience transformative moments while reading the writer's work; persons who had never considered looking at some person, place, thing, or condition until they saw it portrayed in a writer's work; a person who is seeking a miracle and who has come to the writer; an individual the writer must simultaneously forget entirely and keep entirely in mind.

The writer/reader relationship is complex, somewhat of a piece with exchanging highly personal secrets with a fellow passenger on a trip, done with the knowledge of the separate and remote lives each party lives, of the unlikely prospect of their meeting again. And yet. Some writers have a following, some readers anxiously await a new work from a writer.

Readers who admire particular writers often feel as though the writer knows them personally, is writing directly to them, a state of emotion and mind not far removed from the unfortunate individual who sincerely believes that the anchor person of the six o'clock news broadcast is directing him through code and inference to commit acts of violence on behalf of some moral or political cause.

The reader/writer relationship is a partnership of selfishness. Under optimal circumstances, each party profits enormously. The path to achieving that partnership is filled with distraction, frustration, and the underlying subtext that each contact may be the last, a subtext that tempts the writer to want to say more and the reader to ask more.

One way to approach the relationship begins with the writer, who writes the first draft as though it were a deeply held secret, brought out into the daylight in a moment of recklessness. In subsequent drafts, the writer adds relevant details to the extent that he now feels the secret is out of the darkness and visible for what it is, at which point the writer becomes increasingly more aware of the reader, simultaneously adding such details as he believes the reader may ask, removing such details as he believes the reader will already know. Thus the equation of the Reader/Writer relationship: shared secrets.

Muscle Memory

As the unamed narrator of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca did, I last night dreamed of a return. It was not a return to Manderly or anywhere else on the Cornish coast rather it was a return to a practice pretty much no longer practical for me, not since December of 1996, and more emphatically not a good idea after August of 2003.

In the dream, I was running. Judging from the terrain, I was well into what I liked to think of as the final kick in either a 20k or a marathon, up that last groaner of a hill along Shoreline Drive before it slopes down toward the beginning of the Marina across the road from the City College athletic field. I was wet from the more cosmetic than soothing effects of water dumped over my head, my breath steady, my quads knowing they'd been up against a long routine of struggle. In real life as well as in the dream, the outcome of the race was not an issue, starting it, enjoying every step of it, and being hopeful of doing better than the last time out in a race were the primary goals.

Since first my left hip and then my right have been replaced by wonders of modern design, running carries with it the possibility of some mischief. Even though I can log the equivalent of miles on the sophisticated treadmills at the Y, they are nevertheless treadmills, and even though I never approached what could be thought of as quality of performance, I did approach enough miles on the streets and back roads of California, the Central Park Circuit in New York, and such places as Rock Creek Park in Washington and the Mount Tabor section of Portland to leave me, all this time later, with that precious awareness called muscle memory, where closed eyes, not thinking, and a precious sense of movement merge to produce a sensation of effortless floating. "You ran," some running buddies told me, "as though you believed you were getting somewhere special--but not the finish line." My then dog companion, Molly, and I were well known about town in the context of our running.

Now it is swimming, which has its own rewards, its own sense of knowing when the crawl glide works and you are as one with the water as you were with the air when running.

If you do anything long enough to be able to do it without thinking, you are likely to find as often as two or three times a week the sense of unparalleled happiness. It is important at first to think about the steps or strokes or swing or stride. I can still recall hours spent in recreation parks where machines fired an assortment of baseballs at you, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes as a curve or slider, on one or two of the machines, even as screw balls, which break down and away as opposed to the curve breaking or dropping in. Swinging a 32-ounce Louisville slugger Johnny Pesky model at such pitches began with time to result in a constant and satisfying thwack sound as bat met ball, then sent it seeking its projectile destiny some three hundred feet away. The minute you began to think, you were screwed, often missing the next pitch or hearing the thwack change to a thunk.

If you write long enough, often enough, listening rather than thinking, it is possible to hear the literary equivalent of a thwack, an idea sent out on its orbit of dramatic destiny. Or perhaps the sound of a truth being met or an insight coming into contact with the narrative you swing.

Not to belabor the baseball metaphor because anything belabored in your swing or your prose style can cause mischief, fouled off pitches in one case, missed opportunities in another. There are opportunities to be missed, now that you think of it, the opportunity of the finishing kick at the end of a race, where placement in terms of finish is not the issue for you but the feel of a few moments of perfect harmony and coordination within your body is. The professional athlete has a different agenda; you are doing this thing, be it running or swimming or hotting balls in a baseball field or indeed, turning the tables and catching fly balls hit by others in a baseball field. These ancillary muscle memories are some of the preparations you make to be a professional at the writing, to get your ideas and visions and polemics and satires looping out there on trajectories you hope will break windows or dent the roofs of cars in the parking lot.

Fifty, sixty miles or running a week, a mile a day swimming, only a means to get your real set of muscles into shape to do the thing you do to feel that spurt of finishing or the falling-in-love-like swoop of the heart when you get a handle on a new piece and begin it and the sense of elegant despair midway through when you realize you are in one of Dr Kubler-Ross's stages and you know you can never get it down as gracefully and elegantly and effectively and humorously if you are funny as when you first had the vision of it.

Muscle memory is a good thing to experience because once you have it, you cannot let much time elapse before you take it out and use it again, on something, Even a note or a list of things to pick up at the grocery. The muscle memory won't accept that the muscle memory wants you to invent things you'd pick up at a stationery store or a hardware store or anyplace you dare not go for fear you will buy things you have no earthly use for.

You get muscle memory then just to have it, for the knowledge that once you do have it, you will be cranky, pissed, intolerant, impatient if you do not get to use it. Muscle memory has had you out in driving rain storms, your Etonics squishing complaint with every step; it has had your laps at the Y pool interrupted by life guards telling you it's time to clear the lanes for the kiddies lessons; it is discovering you have overdone your day's ration of writing time and you are cranky, pissed, intolerant, impatient to get back to it again the next time because for a few moments there, it was perfect coordination, the sound of it in your ears, the cadence, the movement of those strange persons you'd created, coming to life before you like Amtrack looming down at you, horn blaring.

Muscle memory.

Be There or Be Squashed

Through the happy discovery of several YouTube performances of a favored pianist, Sviatasov Richter, rendering a number of works by a favored composer, Maurice Ravel, I was able to move through the thrill of the music itself, arriving at a useful, informative conclusion. Richter had an enormous repertoire, spanning a chronological gamut from Bach to such moderns as Gershwin, Berg, and Stravinsky. He was particularly fond of Debussy, performed Ravel with the insightful grace of a big man, a powerful performer, executing the lush sophisticated lyricism of Ravel.

Watching these Youtube videos impressed on me the little I knew of Richter, particularly his desire to render the work of the composer as the composer saw it, neither adding to it nor removing from it, neither embellishing nor diminishing what was there. Richter was, accordingly, like an actor, wanting to get at the essence of the text. Text meant a great deal to him to the point where, watching him, listening to him, I felt the connection between Richter and the music that the actor has with the text, that the writer has with the narrative, that the reader has with the narrative.

Into this equation comes the similarity between what the composer of music and narrative do, the play between the word and the note, the relationship each has to time. The word has verb tense, the note has duration. The actor needs to understand the consequences of time and timing, how to draw out, truncate, pause.

Particularly watching and listening to Richter perform Ravel's Alborado del Gracioso, Noble and Sentimental Waltzes, and The Waltz, all three of which are great favorites of mine, it was easy to picture him becoming the piece, the player transformed to the music, the actor losing self wile infusing energy into the text, the writer, during composition, becoming the story. So many stories don't work because there is little or no trace of the writer in them. Stories that do work seem somehow iconic or epic configurations, given reverberation through the writer's eye for physical and emotional details.

A writer's inventiveness is secondary to the voice and intent of the writer in concocting the narrative. What does the writer wish to demonstrate? What evocative details does the writer set up, almost as wind chimes are set up to be nudged into contact with one another by the breeze of the writer's invention?

Can you put yourself into this equation? It surely is an equation as opposed to a formula. The Imp of Perversity whispers into my ear that the more time the writer spends inside the story from the get go, the less time the writer will need to spend maneuvering the snow plow of revision down the pathway.

The Way of All Flash

Although there have been considerable patterns of evolution in the story from the times of pre-written language to the latest edition of some literary journal, the intent has not evolved significantly--because there has been no imperative for it to do so. Literate or not, most of us have some measure of verbal story to tell. Critics will ask us, sometimes for good reasons, for whom the story is intended. (We must not be too hard on critics. They are the literary equivalent of schoolyard bullies we must suffer. Indeed, some of us will become critics, as it were passing along the bullying tradition.)

My own take is that whatever it is we do, we do it first for ourself; it is our own candle in the darkness. We tell ourself a story to set the sensory input in place. We may proceed from there to tell it to others, as a cautionary take. Or as revisionist history. Or as an opportunity to have the final word (knowing there is no real final word), which is to say having satisfaction, however belated.

Also in the rear trunk, packed along with my own take on our needing to tell the story to ourself first, is the added baggage of my belief that much of what we do during the course of any unit of time is to process an incredible amount of sensory input, some of which we have committed to muscle memory because we have bee doing it for so long. I expect a good number of writers to agree with me on this point I'm about to make: We have become writers to teach ourself what it means to be a sensate individual, struggling for survival in a particular culture. After it becomes muscle memory, we are more or less screwed because it is not the easiest way to make a living at it. One saving grace is that any number of men and women who do it better than us are able to make some kind of living from it. (Are there such things as unsaving graces? If so, one of them is that an even greater number of men and women who do it less well than we do nevertheless seem able to make a good deal of money from doing it.)

Writing for one's self is seen by non-writers as self-absorption, possibly even solipsism. On investigation, some of these non-writers will be revealed not to give a damn about where they stand on something so basic, for example, as the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the given being that they are Americans in the first place. Some non-writers would give a great deal to have something to give a damn about beyond, say, the rivalry between the Yankees and Red Sox or the Celtics and Lakers, or is Leonard Di Caprio better looking than Daniel Day Lewis.

Tragedy for the ancient Greeks is related to hubris among the ruling classes. Tragedy for modern wannabe writers is the absorption not in self but rather in tabloid culture wars, formulae of the massmarket as opposed to risks of self-discovery. Tragedy for modern Greeks is Lean Cuisine instead of a serious roast lamb. When you reduce tragedy to cultural expediency and massmarket expectations, humor becomes tragedy sped up.

Just today, someone I've known and admired for nearly thirty years (I first met him after having reviewed his breakout novel) claimed to be growing progressively smarter, making me realize I have for some time been growing progressively dumber, a condition that has nothing whatsoever to do with Alzheimer's or attendant woes but rather from the increased awareness of how little I in fact know and how much factually deficient material is set forth as though it were fact, and, damnit, how much of the latter I have come to accept as though it were fact. From these shadows comes the need to tell myself stories, Aesop's Fables of the twenty-first century, cautionary tales, tales that impart wisdom if not fact. Fact is data verifiable by individuals of all ages, both sexes, many if not all cultures. Wisdom is a way of looking at fact, a lens or set of lenses which allow those who will take the risk of looking at fact without distortion.

Trouble is, reality may be a more serious distortion than fantasy. We'll need a shaman to test this out--a shaman called a writer.

Practice

Within such disciplines as dance, musicianship, drawing, fine art painting, watercolor,photography,and acting, the outstanding exception to the rule is the lack of practice.

My observant experience as writer, editor, and teacher is that the line is frequently drawn between these worthies and writers so far as practice is concerned. My take is that fully fifty percent of writers don't consider practice as all; they write when inspired, approach revision or response to editorial comment with the beginnings of a chip on their shoulder if not defensiveness on their mind.

The other fifty percent are at their computer or notepad or legal pad or some other form of capturing words on a regular basis because this affliction is so real to them that they daydream about perfecting its implications.

One of the most direct and profitable ways of practice is through the blog. Sentences need not be complete, paragraphs need not adhere to rules (To this day I recall a teacher from junior high school announcing that paragraphs should not begin with And or but.), nor do paragraphs necessarily require a topic sentence, nor do blog posts require a nod to social praxis.

Thinking about the other fifty percent, the writers of my observation who do not wish to practice or revise or send forth their own work or take steps to improve their craft would be analogous to a dancer who would not rehearse, a musician who would not practice, an actor who shuns rehearsal and seeks only to perform right out of the box, an artist who does not make sketches.

The blog is a gift to the writer, an opportunity not only to practice but to keep a record of it for future reference, which is to say for added development, addition, enhancement.

A typical blog post qua practice could easily begin, I wonder how this would work: (and then a noun and a verb and off we go).

It is easy for me to say these things, I am thankful to report; my pile of journals and notebooks fills several drawers, some of which are so painful to look at that I am glad in the long run I have saved them because they serve as an evidence of my growth. In many ways I am the eighteen and nineteen-year-old who began keeping records of his practice, my biggest regret that I did not see fit to keep the entire record. Somewhere out in the water tower is a box of older writings I have not looked at since having been ensconced here on Hot Springs Road some ten years ago. Soon Summer will be upon me and I will seek out these boxes and at the very least smooth the pages out and arrange some sort of inside-the-house resting place. Meanwhile, even as the press of time surges upon me, I will nevertheless find some time during the day to practice if only to serve notice to that future day when I regard these exercises that I have truly moved along a path rather than resorted to diary-like notations.

Occupational Night Female Horses

Being a chancy amalgam of three separate work choices--writer, editor, teacher--I not only dream in each valence, I have nightmares in them.

This may have been a part of my waking-sleeping chemistry ever since I came to the triple fork in the road, but if so, my nightmares were as memorable as an agent's promise, and did not manifest themselves in memory until a series of conversations with another triple-hitter, Digby Wolfe, actor, writer, and teacher.

The actor's nightmare, Digby assured me, has the dreamer appearing on stage, preferably in a setting where other actors and an audience are present. It is a nice touch of the nightmare mentality that the dreamer is acutely aware of the audience, because the horrifying part of the dream is the focus on the dreamer having forgotten his lines, and now, everyone is waiting, waiting. The longer the wait, the more agonizing or nightmare-ish the nightmare.

The writer's nightmare does not necessarily require a sleeping state, although being asleep adds a kind of surreal stage direction to the venture. What next? What next? The question persists. Where do I go from here? This nightmare has the lovely bifurcation of the insistent belief that there simply is no more--the last thing to be written was, in fact, just that; the last thing. Now the tank is empty. No calling Auto Club, no visit from the Muse, not even a relative who wants to give you a real story to write about instead of all that stuff you'd been writing about.

Teachers are used to one or more students nodding off during the arc of a class, but a lovely teacher-related nightmare is when the entire class drowses out, their eyes not merely glazed over but shut, their chins tucked. I had this nightmare a number of times and was thus prepared when it came about in a graduate seminar, when all four students were well off into the alpha-wave range.

The mare of nightmare has nothing at all to do with a horse, but rather a presence, an uninvited guest who has come to perch on the dreamer's chest, causing a depressing, morbid weight.

I have asked some musicians if they had occupational nightmares and have heard a range of answers such as being tone deaf, appearing before an audience with an instrument other than one's own and with no knowledge of how to play it, as well as having one's instrument resolutely out of tune.

In jest, I asked a pizza delivery man, who responded gravely that he regularly nightmared about being lost, not finding his way in the maze of Santa Barbara neighborhoods known as The Mesa.

Tony, one of the service reps at Santa Barbara-Goleta Toyota, has had dreams of lifting the hood of an auto, only to discover that the engine is missing.

What a revealing, defining study, not only for the serious academic (and if not an oxymoron, the humorous academic) but for the, shall we say, secular writer, he or she who surfs the reefs and shoals of fiction. How splendid to know the nightmares of the doctor, the lawyer, the used car salesperson. Does the fine artist run out of canvas or oils? Does the dancer nightmare--I'm making a verb of a noun, which is Kosher in English--arthritis? Does a baseball player dream of misplacing his steroids? Does the Australian Cattle Dog or Border Collie have dreams in which cows or sheep already know where to go?

Nightmares, the dream version of the unthinkable, come to pass.

How instructive to know what nightmares press down on the chest of the President of the United States and if, indeed, the thing he sees in his sleep is us. The reverse is surely true: He is the worst nightmare of all.

Here There Be Wrytres!

Some of my best friends are writers, which is to say I have grown up with men and women to whom I was drawn because we shared this passion, a passion we attempted to simultaneously understand and master. Most of us have long since given up trying to understand it; we have come to the awareness that trying to understand a thing often takes time away from doing it and, indeed, trying to master it. Most of us have also discovered that trying to master the process has become of a piece with the advance in computer technology. We no sooner go on the hook for a new computer when we learn of a vastly superior computer to the one we have just purchased on deferred payment. We no sooner feel a sense of familiarity (if not superiority) with a technique when we read a story or novel in which another writer has made us painfully aware that, well, that we were not as far along as we thought.

These friendships with writers are complex and life sustaining. I am reminded of this in more ways that I can enumerate. Having just last night returned from Woodside, the lovely semi-rural fringe between Palo Alto and Redwood City, where I hosted my every-other-month Woodside Writing Workshop, I come, tired-but-buzzing-with-ideas from the readings, the commentary, the interests, and the energy of writers, many of whom I've known for upward of twenty years. Among the group are MDs, shrinks, corporate execs, professors. Andy Grose, an MD, exemplifies the vibe. I am not, Andy insists, a doctor; I am a writer.

I arrive home just in time to fire up my Acer and get in a blog entry before midnight, which is to say I rush home to work off some of the excitement of being a writer. This is not really bragging, I reason, if it is done to one's self and is not meant to make me feel superior to, say, the persons ahead of me as I stand in the check-out line at Vons grocery or the, pun intended, check-in line at Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, Upper Village Branch. It is a part of writerly muscle memory.

Just before yesterday's session begins, I am in the sumptuous kitchen of Flip and Jim Caldwell's home, pouring coffee and looking at Jim Caldwell's large painting of a scene at Venice, showing a cluster of buildings, emphasizing the play of light. At the very foreground, two motor boats, in motion, veer toward us. One boat is bathed in light as, indeed, the left side of the canvas is; the other boat, larger, slower than than the boat on the left, is shrouded with shadow.

There are people, artists among them, who could look at that picture, I observe, and immediately be able to tell from the play of the light what time it is. True enough, Jim Caldwell observes, but that would scarcely register because of the ways in which I have tweaked the viewer's visual priorities.

The creator as tweaker.

We all do it, and when we tweak at our best, we tweak not from thought but from muscle memory, from countless trial runs, practice, drafts, torn-up pages, impatient pushing at the delete key. Whoever we are, we tweak until we get as close to the image we have in mind onto a resident place, a screen, a hard drive, a CD, a canvas, a sheet of paper. I have only to watch Liz Kuball, downloading images from her Canon 5D to her laptop, then sizing them on PhotoShop so that they will fit the space allowed by the Blog matrix to have the notion burned into my emotional archive.

I edit many of my friends; many writers I met as an editor have become friends. Diane edits me. Liz edits me. I edit Digby. Digby ignores my edits, throws everything out, recircles the wagons, protecting against Indians I have not even thought about.

I have edited men and women I have never known in real time. In some ghoulish cases, I have edited some authors who were no longer alive to consult with.

Many of the writers I consider friends are not only dead, they have been dead for years before I was born.

Many writers I read and admire are known sons of bitches, Republicans, reprobates, homophobes, anti-Semites and what have you. I would not want to know them in person even if I could.

As I say: it is a complex relationship, being in love with a writer's visions and technique.

A few days ago, Liz Kuball sent me the now iconic Guggenheim blog by Zoe Strauss and directly I read it, I felt the magic click into place wherein I recognized the genie in the bottle I wrote of a few days ago. The irresistible urge was planted and I have since linked Zoe to a set of my intellectual and emotional archives that began with my having read an essay by Leslie Fiedler in which he wrote of Herman Melville writing about Nathaniel Hawthorne that there was a grand truth about him. "He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes." I wrote to Sol Stein, no slouch of a writer, but also at the time publisher of Stein & Day Publishers. I introduced myself to Sol so that I could thank him for publishing Leslie Fiedler.

Sol and I became friends and yes, he even sent me something he'd written, asking me to comment and check it over for soft spots.

I told you it's complicated.

It gets even better. Last night, tired and spaced-out from a day of running a workshop for writers, then driving three hundred miles, then slipping in a blog entry, I check out Zoe, whom I have never met but now "know" because of her Guggenheim blog. Doing so is like deliberately choosing as a picnic site a place that has been recently struck by lightning. You can see the charred tree trunk, smell the ozone and burnt leaves. And there goes any chance of a restful night of sleep. I am thinking as I read Zoe Strauss's latest No!in thunder, "there is a grand truth about her."

She says she is pissed and overwhelmed and going incognito to sort out feelings and once again, for this viewer, this reader, she has captured lightning in a bottle.