Pay attention: how many times I have written in the margins of a student’s work: what is the purpose here? What is your reason for writing this? Where does this connect to the human spirit, to the human experience? To you? To your readers?
After graduate school, I joined a migration of writers to New York. My homeland was Skokie, a suburb outside Chicago, where our mostly old neighbors had just survived the holocaust and I could walk all by myself to their houses to play cards with them. We lived in identical small ranch houses, mine distinguished by being a place where adults spelled out the word “divorce” over my head like profanity and always in relation to other people. There was dinner every night, breakfast every morning, cocktails and television, piano lessons, BBQs on the patio, a set of World Book Encyclopedias and 12 novels, one of which was Gore Vidal’s MYRA BRECKINRIDGE, which I read on the sly when I was 12.
“When I walk down the street in jeans and a T-shirt, I’m hiding. When I wear these costumes, I am being honest about who I am.”
Goddard MFAW faculty member Darrah Cloud confesses to reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, for the 11th time. “Last night, on the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I put it down and binge-watched a television show on HBO called Master of None…”
