No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
Until high school, I want to be an eye doctor. Writing bubbles on the side but doesn’t occupy the center of my mind. But as a freshman, my English teacher, Mr. Kelly, gives me my first A+ on a paper, and the first one awarded to anyone in the class, he announces. He doesn’t say my name, but everyone knows. When I’m a junior, he tells my parents to buy me a copy of "Writer’s Market".
Reading that final stanza, I began to understand that the last line of a poem is the most important part of the whole structure.
I can still smell the white gardenias of Sardinia and envision the winding staircase of a mansion in Somerset. Oh, to be young again! What is inexplicable today, is that I dislike romance novels, though they once opened up my imagination to the world as a teenager.
Octavia Butler’s "Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Blind Assassin. Sarah Waters and Val McDermid: Stories that are deep and dark and polished and never cutesy and corny and cozy.
Mine is not the story of the little girl who embarked on her lifelong love affair with books whilst blissfully rambling through her local public library. I never begged to go to the library; I usually begged to go home.
...I’ve been working on a number of stories set in and around L.A. Is it logically possible for a place to mesmerize and inspire a certain ennui at the same time?