Rain wakes me at 7 a.m., the day before Christmas. I decide to read Joan Didion with coffee. She died yesterday. Later I will read Slouching Toward Bethlehem . This morning I choose her essay on Ernest Hemingway, Last Words. There will be fried potatoes and green chile for breakfast. Cowboy ate his kibble and …
“Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.” Interview with George Plimpton, Paris Review, 1954.
I am 99 percent convinced now that there is not a novel in me, or at least that I am not capable of producing one. I’ve started enough of them to know that I quickly lose interest and, even if I could carry one through, know I probably would be embarrassed by the result. This …
Waking in the living room at 3 in the morning with the TV still on isn’t so bad when the screenplay is by A.B. Guthrie Jr., from a book by Jack Schaefer, and the scenery includes the Tetons and the Snake River. Two of my favorite actors, Ben Johnson and Jack Palance, are in the …
Here’s some writing advice that made sense to me. I found it in an anonymously written column called “The Notebook” in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. “He is teaching a writing class at the regional high school, via Zoom. Students are on the screen, in the now familiar grid, in various outfits of comfortable clothes. He …
My mind seems like these two: Cowboy looking out the window in the morning and the Georgia O’Keeffe print hanging over my bed. Cowboy’s ears remind me of the Very Large Array, and I think he sees deep. O’Keeffe’s painting is far-seeing, too, its monoliths and movement called Road Past the View II.. Intent as …
I have been so creeped out by reptilian politicians, red Christmas trees and other stuff that I haven’t been able to write. All this despite deeply encouraging changes in the U.S. House. So, for now, I offer an iPhone picture I called “Where the Jemez meets the Rio Grande.” Shallow politicians are easy targets for …
This ship of state — this self-obsessed, rusting hulk of retired newspaperman — steadied the moment I felt the stillness of the coming autumn air. No pain this morning, only a sense of the gentle season ahead. I put out fresh water for scrub jays, finches, titmouses and Texas antelope squirrels, grateful that the rattlesnakes …
from 2017 I was about to let loose with my latest personal essay when I encountered this buzzkill in The New Yorker: “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” I know I shouldn’t let my New Yorker reading pile up. I had heard rumblings of the essay crisis even before the May 2017 New Yorker piece by …
dream ranch 