“If we’re going to do this, I kind of need you to do something first. Or during.”
“Like what?” I leered at him, trying to make my voice sexy.
“Throw me out the bedroom window.”
We All Yearn for Defenestration – Editor’s Pick
First and Lasts
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".
The Comet Year (Novel Excerpt)
Carl had been staying at the house longer than any other visitor ever had. At first, I didn’t realize that he was Carl Ferriman, the writer, the enormously famous writer whose first novel had become such a cultural phenomenon that even I, never much interested in books, had heard about it, probably because it involved hippies, a wounded soldier who had fought in Vietnam, a road trip across America, guns, drugs, sex, and a quest for a mysterious stranger who may have been God’s lost son. Or something like that. In any case, I had never read it and even if I had a copy, it wouldn’t have helped me identify Carl because he wouldn’t allow his picture to be printed on the book jacket. I had heard that, too.
Learning from Leonard Cohen
Reading that final stanza, I began to understand that the last line of a poem is the most important part of the whole structure.
Norma’s Secret/Excerpt from The Guarded Virgin
Oh God, what if my name isn’t there? I do not want to be anybody’s maid or washerwoman. I do not want to scrub white people’s floors. Mother has always warned me and Vera that we should never do such demeaning jobs. I must pass this exam. It is my passport out of this stifling village, my ticket to freedom where I can breathe air without being watched, my ticket to a prosperous future. Oh please, please, let my name be there!
Once I Lived Vicariously Through Books
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.