When I read Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and many others I come away wanting to be a writer. When I read John Grisham, Stephen King, or James Michener I want to either be a lawyer, a clock-tower sniper, or just go back to being a mechanic. A writer has to take me on a journey where I forget where I am.

Wild creature, so beautiful

sad lilting eyes

suicide was not your end

all telling touch, electric

radiant love as a rose

most fragile

God’s perfect gift.

Oh why

beautiful lady

are things

not as they seem,

Winter no longer

is woven

and Spring anew

rises from the dead.

I subscribe to two writing magazines: The Writer and Poets & Writers. I do not subscribe to Writer’s Digest because it comes off as being too positive and not as realistic.

My Driver’s Ed cars were a Chevy Caprice Classic and Chevy Impala. My mom’s car was a 1973 VW Super Beetle. My mom never let me drive her car until the day of my driving test. I learned to drive with an automatic transmission. I drove off to take my driver’s test having never driven a stick before. I stalled it getting out of the driveway and I stalled it all the way down the street. But, I passed my driving test within the hour. My mom was laughing at me driving away, but when I returned with my license she was pissed off.

In some kind of order:

Finding Forrester

Genius

Wonder Boys

When Harry met Sally

As Good as it Gets

Fathers and Daughters

The Rewrite

Reuben, Reuben

Adaptation

Midnight in Paris

Hemingway & Gellhorn

The Whole Wide World

Trumbo

I self-identify as a Poet. I hear this goes well with Memoir and other non-fiction type forms. My problem with writing seems to be that I do not want to lose control of what I am doing and the fact that I wrote next to nothing in junior high, high school, and by testing out of college I also avoided a lot of the writing need there as well. If I am a writer, I am a writer who hasn’t written a whole hell of a lot. If I am a Poet, I am a Poet by birthright and by temperament. Perhaps I just need to let go?

To be, or not to be: that is the ques-
tion:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and, by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the
rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may
come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of
time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s con-
tumely,
The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
ls sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.