Here’s one Christmas gift I found under the tree on Christmas morning.  I cried.  Brian created a tile that looks like my book cover. So very touching. Homemade gifts are the best, aren’t they?

Here’s one Christmas gift I found under the tree on Christmas morning.  I cried.  Brian created a tile that looks like my book cover. So very touching. Homemade gifts are the best, aren’t they?

Barbara DeMarco-Barrett interviews Heather King, author of Shirt of Flame: A Year With St. Therese of Lisieux, and Nell Casey, author of The Journals of Spalding Gray.

It’s true.   Does this mean libraries are on the verge of extinction?  Read more here.

KUCI-FM, where Marrie and I host Writers on Writing, is in the midst of a fund drive. The university continues to cut dollars from our budget, which is laughably minimal as it is. So I especially want to thank the following people for donating yesterday during the show:
Ron Alvarez
Allison Johnson
Bruce Miller
Jennifer Cimaglia
Charles Leister
Sonia Marsh
And a mysterious donor … for the grand offering of $100…..

Another just came in from one of my favorite suspense writers who’s been on the show a number of times: T. Jefferson Parker.

And Sujatha Samy, who listens from the UK.

It’s your support that helps keep the lights on. Thanks you guys and goils!

The Santa Monica Review has been arriving in the mail for years since, or just before, its editor Andrew Tonkovich came on the show. In it I’ve read stories and essays by colleagues, friends, and at least one student. I’ve always liked the journal. It’s literary without being pretentious.

But today, just now, in fact, I was knocked over by a piece in the Fall 2011 issue by Glen David Gold called “Despair.” It was originally a talk he gave at Squaw Valley Writers Conference. I’ve liked Gold’s writing since I read another essay by him in an anthology edited by Kevin Smokler that I wish I could remember the name of now. Bookends, maybe?

I want to tell all of the writers I know to read this essay. It’s the last piece in the book. Gold talks about how the writing is the thing. The process is the most sacred part of anything we do. You’ve heard this before, but the sum of all parts of Gold’s piece is nepenthean.

I’ll back up. I’ve been writing a chapter on forgiveness for my memoir, Blue Corvair. The forgiveness chapters are short and are sprinkled throughout the memoir. For the current chapter, I started with a quote from a Melissa Bank story. One character tells another that to forgive, all you have to do is decide that’s what you’re going to do. No reason. You just forgive because you want to move on. I Googled forgiveness with the idea that the first entry that appeared would be the one I’d follow.

It was Wikipedia. Great. What’s true, what’s made up… I started reading. Forgiveness is good for the health and it’s the most elevated was to be, from all religions’ point of view. I felt dizzy, and lay down with the journal to finish reading “Despair.”

Thank you, Andrew Tonkovich, for publishing Gold’s talk, and thank you, Glen David Gold, for your defiantly great prose.