I didn’t exactly grow up on them-not like the way my teenage years were permeated with the music of Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. The Rolling Stones grew on me later, late in the sixties when I was in my early twenties and my subconscious was searching for some kind of…
Twenty years ago when I guest-edited a fiction issue of Ploughshares, I wrote in my introduction about a scoreboard I had been keeping for the previous seventeen years: a sheet of paper I kept tacked to the wall beside my desk upon which I listed various items out in the world (stories, novels, scripts, essays)-where…
Eyes the color of winter water, eyes the winter of water where I Quoits in the Spartan month Hyacinthius, the game joins us, pronounces us god and boy: I toss him the discus thinking This is mine and the wind says Not yet Memory with small hairs pasted to pale wet skin (the flower hyacinthos,…
Whoever said that I should count on mind? Think it through, think it up—now that I know so much, what’s left to think is the unthinkable. And the will has grown too tired to stamp its foot. It sings a vapid song, it dithers and mopes, it takes its basket to the marketplace, like a…
I think at last I will give up the Blacksmith House. I’ve liked the place since college, when my best friend, Celia, and I would meet for coffee in those frugal, scrubbed pine rooms, full of the feel of long-dead Puritans, which we were not. You could smoke in public in those days, and we…
Preface & Dedication Late last night, January of 2001, temperatures on this Vermont hill farm dropped below zero. Jeff was in the loft of our cabin, sleeping under two blankets and a down comforter, while downstairs in my pajamas and slippers, with a blanket draped over my head and around my shoulders, I stepped outside…
After two and a half years in Hollywood, I came back home to Boston in 1980 feeling like the cartoon man in a barrel. After making the most money I’d made in my life, from writing a TV series I created called James at 15, I was (amazingly) broke. In addition to being out of…
It was discovered on an overcast day that the eyes are two holes the sky passes, that white lilies open without assistants first to the roar of stretching space and then the lion’s loin of the sound, the dayflow, and that there is no cure for this except to think of a clear wreath in…
No woman knows the power she holds at fifteen until it’s gone. Long, loose S of the lower back. Inchoate cheekbone, bracelet of wrist. Soap-soft, uncertain fingertip. Dumb curve of the bottom lip, stunned to mute by its own prettiness. I wore a shell-pink dress with a boat neck collar, my long hair back and…
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