On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, my grandfather barricaded himself with his family-my grandmother, my teenage mother, her two sisters and two brothers-inside of his home in La'ie, a sugar plantation village on Oahu's North Shore. This was my maternal grandfather, a man most villagers called…
Reader to Writer: I've read your book and I must say that I find it offensive. Your view of life is not only wrong but it might be harmful to readers more naïve than I. You are not ethical. Writer to Reader: I'm not responsible for you or the welfare of any of my readers….
It's never been so bad; it's rarely been so good: an assessment of the current state of American poetry. The bad side: circumstances, some economic, some not. Many major book-review and critical journals have almost entirely ceased reviewing books of poetry-at least, poetry by living writers working in English. One rationale given: there are so…
What is this writing life? I was living alone in a house once, and had set up a study on the first floor. A portable green Smith-Corona typewriter sat on the table against the wall. I made the mistake of leaving the room. I was upstairs when I felt the first tremor. The floor wagged…
"Months in our history play an important role. Perhaps no other nation has as many months of importance. There are thus, ‘Polish September,’ ‘Polish October,’ ‘Polish December,’ ‘Polish August,’ ‘January’ as well as ‘November.’" -Antoni Slonimski (1895-1976), poet and essayist 2 December 1981 On my way to school I found a large crowd in front…
Dana Gibson has the real gift, an ability to see and to think and to write in a way that is truly unique and original. Her prose makes even the most ordinary of events take on an almost edenic clarity and freshness. Sometimes her language seems Nabokovian to me in its lilt and life, and…
Susan Straight's prose is as innocent and hard as the lives of the people she loves. It is this love for her characters-unidealized, tangible, as deep as time-that makes her story so extraordinary. Little of moment happens: A woman lies next to her man at dawn and thinks about his back, yet in the evocation…
Deborah Joy Corey's narrators take control as soon as they get behind the wheel of her stories. They pull you into their pickup trucks, or vintage white Cadillacs, or baby blue DeSotos and slam the door. And there you are looking at their world through cracked and dusty windshields, living their lives, drivin' the Vitamin…
With gratitude I recommend to readers this story written by a writer who was a young man in the sixties in America, and who survived the colliding hopes and promises, and the shattering of so many of them, the shattering even of the very sources of so many of them, during that time in our…
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