A guy is swimming towards me. Gray hair, gray goatee. I am in the shallow end of an indoor pool. My six-year-old son is in my arms. My thirteen-year-old son is standing on the concrete behind me. The man says, “Where did you drive in from?:Whenever someone is speaking to me in a language that I can determine is some form of English, but I cannot understand what they are saying, I have what my son’s Karate Instructor calls a muscle memory. But instead of recalling something like a perfect spin kick, I recall sliding across asphalt toward a roadside ditch with my boots still tangled in a motorcycle knowing that I have not yet hit the ground, but will soon. Because when I did impact, the concussion made understanding English difficult for more than a few weeks. Fortunately, no one noticed.”The drive,” he says, “how was it?” I get that he thinks I am staying in the hotel which is located somewhere above the pool, though I have never actually seen it. There is an elevator that discharges people in bathing suits holding the same color towels. But that could be a trick.I say, “I live here.”Now he is confused. Do I live in a hotel with my two children? “I mean, I live in this town,” I say, “no, not this town, a town nearby, but I bring my kids here to swim.” I sound like someone who hit a ditch at sixty miles an hour.He seems okay with that, but he stays close to me and his head is all that is above the water and he looks like one of those author’s heads cut out in the New York Times Book Review next to the list of notable books. It’s a neat visual thing that says, here is what the writers would look like beheaded.This guy wants to say something to me. He dog paddles, though he could easily stand. I give up and ask him, “Where did you drive in from?”He says, “Rhode Island.” Now he is dying to tell me something, but he has to find a way to it. I cannot help him.He asks, “What do you do?”I once traveled through France and Spain for a month, visited family and their friends, and not one person asked me what I did for work. A fellow American swims towards me in a public pool and asks my occupation within three minutes. It’s exhausting. I want to tell him I’m a plumber. The guy I usually hang out with at the pool is a plumber. So I’ll be a plumber, too, and this stranger can tell his friends, hey, you won’t believe who I met swimming in the pool, a plumber!But I tell him I am a writer because it is something I promised myself years ago I would do whenever someone asked me what I did for work. I say it because that is the profession where all my energy and discipline goes and I will not confuse myself by telling someone that the day job I happen to hold at the moment is my occupation. Besides, what if he asks me how to seat a toilet.”What do you write?”"Fiction.”"Do you teach?”"Not really cut out for it.”Then his eyes spark and he says, “I teach at the Rhode Island School of Design.”That’s what he wanted to tell me. Finally, it’s over. I say, “Great school.”He says, “I write a little non-fiction. Seems to be popular right now. Do you write autobiographical?” That is exactly what he said, “autobiographical.” This is non-fiction, right here, right now.I said, “Fiction.”“Oh,” he said and left the pool. He seemed disappointed.Write what you know. Lie to tell the truth. Edit. Cut. Make it up. Pretend. But tell the truth. You with me so far?Lee Gutkind is a non-fiction writer and novelist. His short bio on his site describes how he became the writer he is. I think his journey is similar to what most writers experience as they learn the craft of writing. It comes to a place where you have to communicate some content that matters or entertains or amazes or shocks. Something has to be there other than just the music of the lines.Then add this to the mix: most writers trying to make a living from their craft will have to hustle hard. And that means satisfying reader’s expectations in new ways. Real or fiction. In most working writer’s hands, it’s the same.See what Lee Gutkind did with his ideas about creative non-fiction. Maybe it makes sense to you. It does to me as a moment in time, but when I read anthologies that survey the long history of world literature, I see fiction and non-fiction, writer following writer, building a world.If the writing matters, has passion and urgency in story and content, then it’s good and might last. Categories are for collectors and libraries and retail and schools. Categories help sell books. Keep that in mind when you hear a writer going on about the kind of writing he or she does and how it is new or different. They may very well know better than that. Watch the face for the tell.

New York Magazine recently asked 60 literary critics to name one novel of the last decade that they thought was important, but overlooked and forgotten. It is a compelling list. There are so many great writers and little time to read them. I felt overwhelmed after reading the list and a memory came to me.

A few years ago I drove to Jackson, New Hampshire to hear my friend singer songwriter Peter Gallway open for Jesse Winchester in the tavern of what is now called The Inn At Thorn Hill. As I approached the front desk to register I saw that the wall behind it was a fifteen foot high bookcase stuffed with hardcover books. The wall was at least forty feet wide. After I registered and headed toward the dining room, I passed another long and high bookcase full of hardcovers. The dining room itself was also lined with cases. Every wall in every room in the common areas of this hundred-year-old-plus creaky inn was a full bookcase. There was a sign on the case that ascended up the stairway that lead to the rooms: “TAKE WHAT YOU LIKE, RETURN IT BEFORE CHECK OUT.” I felt dizzy, because I had been scanning the books and had not recognized one title.

>>>>Read more…

Four years ago I got up early on Memorial Day and decided that breakfast out was a good idea. I drove to the only place I thought might be open. It’s a small grocery store and diner called “Fraternity Village” in Searsmont, Maine. I sat down at a table at the open front window and drank coffee and ate fat pancakes with a friend. We were about halfway through the meal when a siren sounded and drums pounded and a parade marched past the window. It was led by five men holding flags and carrying wooden rifles. Their uniforms were white shirts with gold emblems, gold roping here and there, black sneakers, and blue berets. I am sure it was not a United Nations color guard, but it any case, the men had a peace time appearance. They were followed by a marching band made up of kids blowing brass horns, other kids pretending to blow brass, a line of snare drummers, and a boy hitting a bass drum strapped to his chest with such passion it looked like he might knock himself over. They were followed by fire trucks from every town within forty miles.

>>>>Read more…

I liked what Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset did as editors of “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry“. It’s still in print and selling well. It’s a good read and when it isn’t: the weaker stuff is easy to step over. Look, there’s another poem waiting right there. Thick as a phone directory, the book itself made me smile. Heavy poetry. Gothic tattoo lettered title. No poesy allowed. The rock and roll attitude in the presentation feels refreshing to me and self-conscious enough to be a little funny. Think about the title for a short beat. Poets outside the law. It can take some posing to pull that look off.

You might want to skim some of the more profane selections. That would be a fair amount of skimming. Still, the energy is there and the passion. And for spoken word artists, so are the techniques. At times the books reads like a manual for live poetry presentation. How not to water your audience’s eyes.
>>>>Read more…

Kurt Vonnegut is no longer stuck in time. I first heard of Vonnegut when he was protesting a war. He was described in a newspaper article as a fiction writer who had been a prisoner of the Germans in World War II. He had my attention.

I read everything he wrote. It was hard not to. His paperbacks seemed to be everywhere. I read him to find out why others read him. But for me there was something like cruelty in the music and structure of his writing that bothered me. I will never forget the scene in his 1969 novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” where a prisoner of war, walking out of a dark hole into sunlight, is surprised to find himself alive after the fire bombing of Dresden. He absent-mindedly picks up a porcelain figurine from the rubble and is immediately put up against a wall and shot dead for looting. The scene had the absurdity of real life and a slapstick structure. It disturbed me. Later when I saw the scene in the movie made of the novel, it was as painful as I imagined it.
>>>>Read more…

Adbusters Magazine is one of the best things happening in our culture and largely ignored by literary web log sites. I remember the feeling of excitement I felt when I first saw an altered billboard in San Francisco that had a large lipsticked mouth with gleaming teeth glued on the small head of a nearly naked model embracing a bottle of scotch whose label now read DEATH. This was in a district ravaged by street alcoholism. I thought then, and do now, that billboard was radical art worth being arrested for. I am not recommending illegal acts. I am writing about them. I remain a coward.

What I love about these two noted articles on the Adbusters web site is that the first one “In Search of New Comrades“ accurately describes the insanity of the far left’s embrace of religious facists in their attempt to resist the far right. The article ultimately decries the lack of great writers presently attending to issues of the left.
>>>>Read more…

Why would anyone want to list their personal library in public?

That was my question when I heard about Tim Spalding and his LibraryThing site last year. It makes sense if you are a rare book seller and want people to know what you have, but why would others take the time?

Business 2.0 magazine reported in their April 2007 issue that LibraryThing now has 10 million books listed and in January 2007 had 20 million page views. It has become an immense social networking site and will soon be selling books.

>>>>Read more…

I enjoy reading criticism and review, but I don’t write it.

I am also a baseball fan. Statistics bore me and I don’t have room for the hiring/firing/trading drama that follows star players, but I love driving down to see the regional farm team. If I’m lucky, I will get lost in the game and feel that strange combination of distraction and concentration that comes with sitting in the warm sun anticipating the next pitch. I don’t play baseball either

Last night, after watching some friends perform comedy live in a VFW Hall for broadcast on a local cable station, we all met in a bar with many televisions set on a variety of stations. Music played. Above us on plasma the Red Sox were playing the Rangers. The crowd was funny and loud until TV by TV, like a virus, a show that featured muscular men with no body fat and no body hair and many tattoos punching each other and rolling around on the floor of a caged boxing ring took over every TV. The announcer’s voice got louder and louder.

>>>>Read more…

My Uncle John once gave me a non-fiction book and told me to read it “because it was true”. The last name of the author was Gregory; he was or had been an attorney in public service. (I have not been able to find the book listed for sale, used or new, on any book site: a comment on mainstream publishing as it stands.) The book described murderous characters involved in the drug trade who enjoyed a strange freedom from United States prosecution.

While writing the last story in the WAYSIDE CROSS collection, I wanted to briefly review the current privatization of prisons and halfway houses. I found a site referenced in a web log that brought my Uncle John’s gift to mind and that also illustrates how the internet can elegantly keep contentious subjects before the public.

>>>>Read more…