I finished Amy Bloom’s Love Invents Us last night and am starting tonight on The Known World by Edward Jones who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first book. That is the kind of news that makes me deeply depressed. I have an almost kick me in gut reaction, most of the time I just want to get a book out there and then the other half of the time I worry that it won’t be good enough, what ever the hell good enough is.

Sometimes I feel like a race horse with the need to focus ahead, ahead being that place that says just write all your stories down and let the rest sort itself out. Not to think about anything else but getting words to paper.

I just finished my first book review of Dancing in Odessa which will be published in the next issue of Tryst. One of my favorite poems in that book is the Authors Prayer here is a taste…

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.