THE WRITING LIFE
How Not to be Bitter
Word Count 1281
No teacher ever encouraged me to write. I once turned in a short story to my college professor, the writer Lydia Davis, about a father who yelled at his daughter in front of the Plaza hotel after she complained about the blisters on her feet. “No!!” Davis wrote in the margin. “Cliché.” But it was based on a true story! I was crushed but also offended—were the exclamation points really necessary?
My senior year, I decided to write a paper on Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in heroic couplet, just as Pope did in his poems. It took forever to line up the rhymes and I was certain my professor, who had always given me A’s, would approve. I got my worst grade ever—a B. “I was surprised by how flat the images were,” he wrote.Cliched. Flat. The universe was not saying, become a writer. But when I considered all the other professions available to the kind of person who has a 300 point spread between her math and English score on the SAT, “Writer” glowed like a Vacancy sign in a snow storm.
Burn This
Word Count 1077
I’ve been working on a novel for more than fifteen years. I can’t remember when I started it. I can’t remember the impulse behind wanting to start it. It was first person, then third, then omniscient. Initially, it was filled with lots of sex. But it’s hard to write sex, unless you’re Philip Roth. I hope that being lousy at writing sex isn’t a correlation to how you are in bed. Anyhow, I took all the sex out. Then I went back to first person. I had the characters end up hating each other, then switched it. The mother was a confidant and then a rival. I put the sex back in when I decided the book should unfold while the protagonist was splayed out, bound to four bedposts, while her lover, a forgetful man, wanders off for some reason and fails to return.
Literary Rejections: The Ultimate Quiz
Maurice
Word Count 845
A warm July evening in 1985. I was dining in a small Bistro with my friend Maurice Girodias (Uncle Mo to me) who had been deported back to his native France. Maurice’s life had been one of flamboyant triumphs followed by spectacular downfalls. As a young man in the 50s, he had established the Olympia Press, where his titles ranged from Henry Miller, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett to the notorious “Traveler’s Companion” series, pure porn published in English for American GIs. In the 60s, he had sunk all his money into a three-story, multi-themed nightclub, “Le Grand Severin” which was closed by the gendarmes after its production of de Sade’s “The Philosopher in the Bedroom. Maurice went bankrupt.
First Day on the Job
Word Count 1668
I was hired because I wrote a dirty story I submitted to a post office box in Grand Central Terminal responding to an advertisement in the Village Voice calling for freelance writers. The ad specified the story be erotic and that spoke to me because I liked erotica. I submitted a fairly ridiculous but well-written story about a couple who orchestrated a threesome with a stranger, detailing every conceivable position and body part a person could lick, suck or screw, written in my kitchen while sitting on a high wooden stool at a bar-height butcher block counter built for me by an on and off again boyfriend. I was just starting to think of myself as a writer and writing erotica came easily having spent my formative years digesting soft-core porn from my mother’s collection of novels by Harold Robbins, Jackie Susanne and William Goldman.
The Slush Pile
Word Count 323
In 1979, Chuck Verrill was hired as the new slush reader for the Viking Press. I was the old slush reader, so it was my job to train him. Slush was the lowliest of jobs, but it took place in a tiny office with a door that closed and a window that opened, and we sat and we smoked and we opened every manuscript that came without an agent, and all letters addressed to Editor in Chief, took a look at everything and then and sent everything back. If something was especially funny or awful we’d read it aloud to the other. It was a good way to get to know someone.
Literary Parties, Pt. 1
Oh, those parties. Most of our writers have only vague boozy memories. But a few brave souls dug around in the recesses of their minds to bring back to life the parties that were the hallmark of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Where Does Writing Come From?
Word Count 1589
About 45,500 years ago, a human placed one hand on the rock wall of a cave in Indonesia and with the other blew dark red pigment over it, leaving a stenciled handprint. Next to it, someone drew a pig with a curly tail. These images are the earliest known figurative cave art created by a human species, signaling the awakening of a “higher order consciousness” that made symbolic thinking and the creation of art possible. One speculation is that the hand represents an attempt to communicate with a world of spiritual forces through the portal of the wall.
Deadline
Word Count 1114
For many years, I wrote for a major national newspaper. The paper was famous, but I was not — mostly I reported for a regional section, covering whatever happened in a specific county in New York.
It was a great gig, but every year an onerous assignment rolled around, dubbed “The Lives They Lived.” These were obituaries of people who lived in the county, died the previous calendar year, and made an impact on their community.
I had a good deal of leeway in choosing who to include. It might be a well-known politician or artist, but it also included teachers, devoted volunteers, a compassionate veterinarian, and others who may have been under the radar but affected many lives.
The assignment was a bear. This was in the Before Time — during the 1990s and the early aughts when print newspapers had loads of advertisements and plenty of room for copy. The damn thing ran for pages, and each obit included a photo.
Dinner with David Letterman
Word Count 1127
I’ve been writing since I was a little girl. In the beginning, I would send material to Mad Magazine under the name “Dean,” as I saw that it was mainly written by boys. My father had taught me how to write and I wanted to be like him — funny. But of course laughter is also a way of dealing with pain. It served its purpose for a long time, covering a multitude of family sins and propelling me into a chuckle-based career for years. At first, I wrote numerous pieces of satire and parody And then, one day, I became a comedy writer, staffing for shows such as “Square Pegs” (Sarah Jessica Parker’s first series), “A Different World” (the Cosby spin-off with Lisa Bonet), and others.
Literary Parties, Pt. 2
More tales of parties of yore.
Aha Or Oy Vey
Word Count 357
At age 8, I began writing on legal pads my father took from his office. My mother was ill and distant. My pencil and pad became my friends. I loved being alone to say what I wanted.
My heart is in the personal essay. As a teacher on New York’s Lower East Side, I wrote about losing my class during a Museum of Natural History field trip, my desk-banging pupil who would arrive late and hungry if he arrived at all, and the racist teacher assigned to train me.
Every
I feel like my poems
go on and on.
I want to fill them
with every sip, every
twist, every cheek