“In writing, you must kill your darlings.” - William Faulkner For some reason I have always thought this was a Dorothy Parker quote, it seems like something she’d say. You can just see her sitting at the round table at the Algonquin, smoking a cigarette and drinking a Scotch, making this kind of proclamation among a… Read more »
We are sitting in the special assistance section of Penn Station, surrounded by a Lucite fence with a steel railing. We have a receptionist at the entrance and then another receptionist just for our section. Red caps are in attendance. We are waiting for our train back to Philadelphia, surrounded by a sea of empty… Read more »
“Who will teach me to write? A reader wanted to know. The page, the page, the eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that… Read more »
The third grade at the Baldwin School, on the mainline of Philadelphia, has been studying poetry and Parkinson’s this spring. When their teacher, Ms. Maria Berger, read my op-ed in The Philadelphia Inquirer about poetry and Parkinson’s (see previous post), she asked if we might come visit them to read some poetry and talk about… Read more »
“Revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party.” – Billy Collins There’s something about the word “revision” that reminds you of high school or college, term papers and grades, tedium and boredom. Over the years, I’ve changed my feelings about the revision process, have come to see writing as revision. The… Read more »