I hate blogging.

It's been awhile since I have written on my blog. I am willing to admit it now: It's on the level of writing groups. My position as a creative writing teacher gave rise to all kinds of encouragement to join local writing groups in the interest of the university before I entered the land of the tenured living. Why do writers join writing groups? Why aren't they home writing? How many of these people are published? I resented every second I had to devote to this form and lamented lost writing time. I try to imagine Faulkner with a blog, Hemingway, Wolff, Thomas Mann, John Updike. I try to imagine their hanging out with writing groups. I can imagine them better spending hours, as the story goes, mulling over a comma. What did you do all morning? I put a comma in a sentence. What did you all afternoon? I took it out. Publicity is more important than talent and hard work in this age of vampire, fantasy, celebrity lit.

LUCKY JOYCE

I emailed Andre Codrescu and mentioned that he is mentioned in the first chapter of my new novel LUCKY JOYCE. I emailed the pages his name appeared to try it out on him. I related a true Andre story from the years that I taught at LSU. He was not offended and offered encouragement and said that his academic novel was coming out soon. I also wrote about a party at Vance Bourjaily's, but since there was no aspersions cast I feel I don't have to run Vance down. There is a genre known as fan fiction. When one is very famous it is safe to write about them. It is the private individuals that may take offense and have legal grounds. (My son is a lawyer.)