For once, no flowers. Past midnight, and very quiet along this corridor. The clock on the opposite wall is round, a cartoon clock. Funny, the idea of keeping time, here of all places. Beneath the clock, a square tablet announces in bold what is now the wrong date, April 3. I could walk…
This is a story about not doing; this is a story about everything else. The trouble with writing is that it’s too easy not to do. Imagine if eating chocolate was as easy not to do as writing. Or paying your mortgage. Or making an eight o’clock class. Imagine if you were firmly convinced that…
I understand women the way junkies understand shooting up. Feel the rush, make the pain go away, and think about the next fix. I don’t know what to do when the glow wears off, when a real person floats to the surface of the dream. It’s the sixties, after all, and what might be pathology…
The time of us on earth is spent lightly on good peas and gravy good enough for a second time in an hour -poem by Jon, when he was eighteen years old, as remembered by my mother Chapter (Dear) Dear Dad Dear Father Dear Jon Dear Pop, (This letter is now a part of the…
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Muriel Spark. I was speaking to her over the phone at her house in Italy, and so, in addition to my great admiration for her and the distance between us in years, there was a substantial geographical distance. Knowing that she hadn’t published her first…
By then-1947-I had gone back to Harvard to earn my master’s degree in comparative literature and quickly completed the required credits. Hugely pregnant with my first child, I flunked the Latin exam, for which I was underprepared (the French exam was easy). Harry Levin, who had been my tutor during my senior year, interceded for…
I have one powerful reflection regarding the issue I edited of Ploughshares. A friend, a former student, a poet, an ally in the battle against the Vietnam War, a wiry little Irishman with a great sense of humor, phoned me about that time and asked if I were busy; he was in town and wanted…
I remember the office on Waverley Avenue in Watertown and the karate studio next door; periodically the floor would vibrate and the walls would thump with energy I like to think we reciprocated. On my first day as managing editor, I remember sorting through hundreds of three-by-five index cards with names of subscribers, none 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…
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