Dad used to joke about what he was reading in the waiting room when we were born. Titles I remember are Nausea and As I Lay Dying. This did no justice to his first wife and mother of his three sons, but it is a funny reflection on an earnest, hard-working Depression-era guy who came …
It’s tougher than you might think, being retired and trying to find a second wind as some kind of creative writer — an ambition I call, after 41 years as a newspaper reporter and editor, “Making It All Up.” For one thing, it seems to require discipline, which is a bit of shock to …
Old Cabezon suggests a new canvas every night. I wish it also would reveal a plot or two.
T.C. Boyle: “People tend to romanticize the picture of a writer—they want it to be easy, something a genius can just knock off between debauches, because if it is, if it doesn’t require talent, discipline and a lifelong commitment, then maybe there’s a hope that they, too, someday can knock out their own great and …
This writer said this 15 years ago: Paris Review/Summer 2000 No. 155 T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Art of Fiction No. 161 (click on this for the full interview). Interviewed by Elizabeth E. Adams INTERVIEWER Do you think it would be possible for a writer today to have the sort of success Dickens had? To be …
It was a dark and stormy afternoon.
After wrestling with life-and-death questions involving bacon, the Good Friday pilgrimage to Chimayo and the opening of the Trinity atomic bomb test site, I chose Cheerios for breakfast and felt righteous until my worst blood sugar crash since Larry Calloway and I encountered space aliens deep in the Weminuche Wilderness. Today, I started the day …
I don’t want to write about cancer, but the disease is forcing my hand. I fear illness and imagination are disparate states. Despite treatment for prostate cancer 13 years ago, I am still learning what I’m up against this time around. But maybe I’m just being whiny about wanting it to be like the cancer-free …
I’m in trouble when it comes to writing a novel. Big trouble. And I’ve known for a long time. Two of the few opening scenes ever to come to mind, despite more than 50 years of daydreaming, had, one, the hero driving up a mountain road in Colorado in a red sports car and, two, …
dream ranch 