Meeting Walter Kirn
The first time I met Walter Kirn was in the late 90s. When I met him again last year, I didn't expect that it would result in an adventure with Harper's Magazine!
Three Reasons You Need to Listen to the Audible Version of Free Women, Free Men by Camille Paglia
I’ve been a fan of Camille Paglia since the summer of 1997 when I sat in the un-air conditioned spare bedroom of my grandmother’s house reading Sexual Personae and wondering at her bold, smart and vibrant tone. The ideas she wrote about were new to me and while I enjoyed the book in my early twenties I can’t say Paglia’s subject matter resonated with me or that I fully understood her concepts until the last few years. I am also a fan of listening to books primarily due to being in a constant time crunch. I can listen in the car or while cleaning, or even through earphones while…
Nicknames, You Called Me What?
Nicknames belie a certain intimacy. They are gifted by someone who knows us or knew us in a way others didn’t. Then this bit of history carries on, sometimes long after the giver is gone. The name spreads to others without the history or the intimacy, giving strangers, acquaintances, new friends the impression they know you better than they do. Or that they know something about you that you didn’t share yourself. Do we choose our nicknames or do our nicknames choose us? Do our nicknames become us, or do we become our nicknames? At the same time, they can create distance and confusion as people struggle with what to…
What I Hate About My Readers
The one thing I can’t stand about my readers is that you assume everything I write is autobiographical. Maybe not ALL my readers, but the ones who talk to me assume this. And honestly, the rest of you who don’t talk to me probably assume it too but just don’t say anything, so I take it back. This is what I hate about ALL my readers. I hate it. It drives me up the wall. It makes me crazy. And this is why: First Of All When you come to me and ask me if something is about me, you are never really asking. You think you already know the…
Writing About Sex and Sports
Sex is one of the hardest subjects for many writers. It can be hard enough to talk about; we tend to make jokes, be evasive, fall into cliché descriptions. We love the subject but we don’t always love talking about it. Writing about it, in detail, is even harder. It’s easy to sound too vulgar or too prudish. It’s common to feel too vulnerable, writing about something that regardless how great or fantastical or fictional your other writing may be, people will assume is your personal history or your fantasies. We can write science fiction, murder mysteries, gory thrillers and no one will assume you are a murderer but if…
