"Jobs were terribly scarce in the mid-1950's. There were, with the exception of Stanford, no other writing programs out there. Teaching what is now called Creative Writing wasn't an option. And many of the academic teaching jobs had already been snapped up by the preceding generation of GI Bill people with graduate degrees."
"...I like to draw; I was good at it. I had a prodigious grasp of perspective that let me render things photographically with devilish ease. I was like those autistic wunderkinds ... Only I wasn't autistic..."
"I started writing stories at about eight or nine years of age, as soon as I could reasonably put pen to paper. I'd be frustrated that books I read would end, so I'd pick up and write new endings, or sequels..."
"I started writing stories at about eight or nine years of age, as soon as I could reasonably put pen to paper. I'd be frustrated that books I read would end, so I'd pick up and write new endings, or sequels. When I was nine, I read Jack London and realized that that was what I wanted to do with my life. No. More than that, I believed I could do it. And so I was soon making up my own adventures on the page. Of course, looking back, the whole thing seems absolutely improbable, and I can't help but wonder what it is in us that defies commonsense and says, instead, 'You can do this'."
"I believe that poets have always been shamans, griots, storytellers, seers, sorceresses, since long before writing, and that it's our duty to continue that tradition, no matter what culture we find ourselves born into. If we have been born with the gift, it is our responsibility to use it for the benefit of the tribe speaking truth to power, turning our visions into art to the best of our abilities."
"Like many kids I tried writing little poems and stuff, but it was my eighth grade spelling teacher who sent me on my way. She assigned us the task of making a story out of the week's spelling words and then read mine to the class. After that, I knew I wanted to be a writer."
"When I was sixteen or so I wrote a tale about an Egyptian slave. I called him Brute. He was influenced by Conan the Barbarian, God help me, but I wrote this thing out and read it to my mother and sister. They weren't impressed."
"While my parents weren't big readers, they were good at story-telling. My great great grandmother was a "Lady" in Scotland and lived in a castle, but threw it all away to marry the gardner, so the story goes. I was intrigued by stories like that as well as fairy tales and Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden."
One of my writing teachers, Michael Martone, wrote this hilarious little brochure called "Rx," which was a list of "rules" for writing. I remember one rule was "You can never say too little about the color of a character's eyes."
For a very long time, from about 1973 until the mid-1980s, bookstores were right at the center of my life -- my employment, my social life, and the mill for my reading and writing obsessions. I had bookstores instead of grad-school.
