Colleagues Are A Wonderful Thing

I Grew Up In The Shadow Of The Trujillato, Saw How The Regime Had Ravaged So Many Families.

But It's Clear To Me That Us Slow-poke Writers Are A Dying Breed. It's Amazing How Thoroughly My Young Writing Students Have Internalized The New Machine Rhythm, The Rush Many Of My Young Writers Are In To Publish. The Majority Don't Want To Sit On A Book For Four, Five Years. The Majority Don't Want To Listen To The Silence Inside And Outside For Their Artistic Imprimatur. The Majority Want To Publish Fast, Publish Now.

Used To Be In The Old Days, Only The Pulp Writers Wrote Like Machines. Now Everybody Is Expected To Be Literary John Henrys. So In That Context Someone Like Me Is An Anomaly.

New Jersey For Me Is So Alive With History. It's Old, Dynamic, African-american, Latino.

Instead Of Lowering Your Head And Copping To It Like A Man, You Pick Up The Journal As One Might Hold A Bady's Beshattered Diaper, As One Might Pinch A Recently Benutted Condom. You Glance At The Offending Passages. Then You Look At Her And Smile A Smile Your Dissembling Face Will Remember Until The Day You Die. Baby, You Say, Baby, This Is Part Of My Novel. This Is How You Lose Her.