Thirty stories now completed. Have been working today on my ms You Wake One Morning, Remembering. Rearranging the contents. I want to enter it into contests. Nearly 50 poems based on my dance with prostate cancer—it's discovery, treatment with radiation and hormone therapy and semi-recovery. The cancer's still there. Much reduced. My urologist says I'll die of something other than prostate cancer. Only time will tell. He's the one who likes to say, "Everyone's got to die someday."
Lately my rejections have been accompanied by requests to resubmit. Either editors are becoming kinder with their rejection letters, or I'm getting closer. I'm reading Hemingway's short stories recently, having finished Raymond Carver's. It's been a half year since a poem of mine was included in Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro's project, Washington Poetry Map. It's there near Huckleberry Mountain just north of Interstate 90. My record is pretty consistent—one or two publications a year. Nothing spectacular. Not bad for a writer who is a stranger to most, if not all, editors of literary magazines, internet as well as hard copy.
The recent photo reveals the fact I'm letting my hair grow long on the top. On top that is.
Yesterday I finished the 7th rewrite of The Porn Writer, but the doubts are back, a swarm of squids on the sea floor of my imagination. Today I'm reading at the Black Rock on 164th Avenue, Vancouver. Twelve ounces of soy chai for $3.75. At Starbucks it's $4.39. I found a shiny dime on the floor just now. I'm making the mistake of reading Plimpton's book on Truman Capote: in which various friends, enemies, acquaintances and detractors recall his turbulent career. If you read it you'll conclude that you must be alcoholic or bat shit crazy to be creative. It's a picture of how I tried to behave and talk during my drinking years. I thought craziness equated to genius. At least two women in my past told me that the way I used language in those days was a sign of a mentally unbalanced mind. A psychologist who was leading a weekend group encounter session in the Huckleberry Mountains north of Spokane once told me I had a "quicksilver mind". I was quite proud of that, then he asked me if I was there to learn something. When I said, "Yes," he asked me to shut up and listen to what the others had to say. I kid you not, I fell over on my side and went immediately to sleep. That first session he'd put out bottles of wine to loosen us up. I was quickly very loose. The second time I showed up I'd quit drinking. During a walk down a mountain road, the psychologist told me he hadn't liked me very much that first weekend. He said I was now a very different person. I was, but for all my trying to behave like a creative person [my output is immense], I'm 78 [79 on October 20] and have little financial or public acclaim for my efforts. Sometimes I wish I could grasp even a fraction of the way my mind shot between metaphors and linked them in mad clusters of language when I drank. I can't even come close.
Thirty stories now completed. Have been working today on my ms You Wake One Morning, Remembering. Rearranging the contents. I want to enter it into contests. Nearly 50 poems based on my dance with prostate cancer—it's discovery, treatment with radiation and hormone therapy and semi-recovery. The cancer's still there. Much reduced. My urologist says I'll die of something other than prostate cancer. Only time will tell. He's the one who likes to say, "Everyone's got to die someday."
