We's arteests

I live for my fanmail. I write a lot of stuff for very limited distribution and don't care who reads it. That is the nature and magic of writing. All you gotta do to join is to read it.If I had ever worked out how to make a living at writing, or someone had already invented that wheel and just told me about it, maybe I would be doing that. Teaching is the only day job most artists can muster that directly relates; marketing one's work is another whole study; and the competition of academia is not always nurturing to some artists. Arteests. Some of the best poets I know are cab drivers, or housewives, or run for mayor.

Book arts (single handwrit copies) is pretty much where I live, in a professional sense. "Spoken words fly away, but the written word remains." Notebooks, have I got notebooks. Catherine kept them for me in an Annie Green Springs box in her attic when I moved to Miami, but now I have got them in a file cabinet. One folder of correspondence is still labeled "High School Madness." And a bookcase, or twelve.

Doris Lessing in The Golden Notebook had her protagonist's life divided into separate colored notebooks until like separate personalities they were all integrated into The Golden Notebook. But I digress.

I was going to write a novel. Before I was so rudely interrupted. But then there was too much material. It was going to be about how some kids tried to help each other grow up.

A time passed, and now it seems, everybody is having these dreams. (Bob Dylan said that, in "Talking World War Three Blues". Also:) I'll let you be in my dream, if I can be in yours. I like movies where the line between fantasy and reality is a teensy bit smudged. Everyone has their own version. That's postmodernism.