writer and teacher
Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life —…
I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred…
A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while. I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’…
This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and…
Some news, as I surface briefly between end-of-semester projects: I’ll be working at the Harry Ransom Center as a public services intern for the next two years. I’m thrilled about it — everyone I’ve met through the interviewing process has been wonderful and I’m terribly excited about the work I’ll get to do. Expect many…
Chasing deer out of the backyard: a picaresque adventure, full of entertaining incidents, naughty language, and large-gauge plastic mesh fencing. Briefly touring the coast of Oregon (between Reedsport and Newport) and spending two days in Eugene. There’s a little town called Yachats with one of the most wonderful coffeeshops in the world, a strange little…
Anna Genoese talks about GLBTQ publishing and genre fiction, and why it might be better from a publishing standpoint to write a genre-marketable book with queer characters than to market one’s book as “queer fiction.” For a counterpoint, focused on literary fiction, see Edmund White’s Village Voice article on the recent flowering of gay fiction…
Today, I am scanning. More specifically, I’m scanning the approximately three-hundred-page manuscript of my grandmother Louise’s memoir — or however much of that manuscript I can manage today before I go entirely nutty with boredom. This manuscript is the basis of my next writing project. I’d read a bit of it before and remembered it…