I am staring at David Foster Wallace tonight, surrounded by my newly filed writing projects for this semester. I am staring at him because tomorrow I will be once again teaching his writing in my magazine class, wondering if the students really feel the warmth of his words as they spill across the page. Manic. […]
1. I preach to my kids: write every day. I should stop there and clarify that sentence. Because I don’t exactly have kids. I am a professor. I have students. But they are mine. At least for 17 weeks each semester. My job is to help them find the tools they need to go live […]
Prologue. Curveball. The last time I held a baseball bat, with any seriousness, was May 1990. I remember because of what I didn’t do. I remember because years of my life came to focus in that one at bat, that one moment where I expected to succeed in ways that I had succeed before. I […]
1. The first movie I obsessed over, in the kind of way that can only be felt by the young, was Pump Up the Volume. It was the summer after my freshman year at Miami University. I was sober for the first time. I was home in my parents condominium, a place they bought not […]
1. The average lifespan of a white American male is 78 years old. I am 37 right now, which means I’m screaming towards middle-age. The halfway point. You know, if I’m lucky. It’s been a rocky road, though, so I don’t expect that I’ll get to live out that average. Not because I’m a fatalist. […]
General Butler State Park. This is my writing refuge. The place I go where there is no other place for me to go. The chaotic swirls of my life don’t find their way here. I am not sure why. I do not question these places. And yet I don’t always trust the quiet solitude. I […]
Hello Students: You have all heard me discuss David Foster Wallace numerous times throughout the semester (including the class-opening essay, which I still encourage you to read). This will likely not stop during the last 8 weeks. I’d apologize, but since I’m not going to stop, it seems disingenuous to do so. However, of all […]
Jim Carroll died today. This is weird for me. But not in the same way that it was weird for me when David Foster Wallace died. Or Hunter S. Thompson died. Those two days were low points in a life that was already spiraling out of control. Dark, evil days. Those two writers were the […]
Nathaniel Hawthorne. F. Scott Fitzgerald. Hunter S. Thompson. David Foster Wallace. These are my mentors, the writers in my life who have shaped my thinking, my narratives, my words. They are the familiar community of comfort, the places I visit when I’m lost. That they tell, in some manner, stories about the American Dream — […]
Buckle up. I’ve been reminiscing about the good old days quite a bit lately. Writing does that to me. Moving probably doesn’t help either. And trying to fill in the gaps with the Muse has been a big part of that as well. It’s been an interesting saga, these last 14 years. I tell these […]
“You don’t know me very well, but if you get me started I have a tendency to go on and on about how hard the writing is for me.” — “Californication”, Hank Moody The trouble with summer is that I have time to write. To sit for long periods of time, wringing my brain like […]
A long time ago there was a girl. And the future wasn’t something meant to be made. We were just waiting for the thing we could already see, arrive. We lived our lives together. That way. With few doubts. Directed. It was the first time I’d ever experienced that inevitability with someone else. My parents […]