Talking Up My Writing Friends

1. I know I've mentioned this essay before, but you should really read Thomas Rayfiel's piece about Ivy Compton-Burnett in the Threepenny Review. Tom is also a novelist, and he says he's going to send me his new one when it comes out. I can't wait. As I've started work on my own Dame Ivy piece, I've been rereading his and wishing that I'd written that one instead of the one I am writing. His essay captures so exactly the experience of reading those difficult, unpleasant, meanly funny novels. Like trying to "eat pebbles," he says. Like "freezer burn." Ain't it the truth.

2. Charlotte Gordon is featured in a recent interview on New Dimensions, a nationally syndicated Public Radio program. The thing about Charlotte is that, while she's an excellent, intelligent, and engaging writer, she's 100 times better than that in person. She is what my great-aunts might have called "a piece of work." Anyone who attended last summer's Frost Place Teaching Conference can attest to her rare combination of high intellect and mesmerizing joie de vivre. This interview will give you a chance to experience some of those qualities.

3. My dear friend and mentor Baron Wormser has a new collection of poems forthcoming from CavanKerry Press, which I had the honor of copyediting last week. "Honor" and "copyediting" are not words that I generally use in the same sentence. Baron's website has a sample from that collection as well as links to recent essays, including "The Wire and the Wasteland," which, among other things, imagines T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as an HBO series.

4. Another friend, Meg Kearney, has a new collection of poems, Home by Now, that is now available from Four Way Books. Meg wrote a blurb for my own forthcoming collection, took me cross-country skiing for the first time ever, and, most importantly (in the eyes of my children), owns a three-legged dog. She also directs the Solstice MFA program at Pine Manor College, used to work at the National Book Foundation, is almost exactly my age, writes very good poems, and is pretty.

5. This sounds like self-promotion, and it sort of is, but Weslea Sidon has just reviewed Tracing Paradise for Wolf Moon Journal, a Maine-based online magazine. Weslea is the person who owns the cottage by the sea that I periodically visit. She is also a poet, a classical guitarist, and an excellent poetry critic. Weslea is exactly the sort of person whom you want to meet in a poetry workshop: she embodies a rare combination of generosity and acuity, and I'm very grateful for her review. Here's a little poem of hers called "Coffee."