Reprint
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No Contact, Asshole!
The summer of 1990 was a bad one. It should have been a good one but it was a bad one. I’ve pulled a lot of stunts in my day, mostly of the sick sexual variety, but that summer I…
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The Fine Art of Quitting
To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle. — Confucius
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I Married a Novelist
“What’s it like to be married to another writer?” Someone asks this question, with varying degrees of fascination, every time I do a reading. It’s as predictable as the person who laughs in all the wrong spots, or the question about…
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How Did It Come to This?
An oral history of May 3, 1987, the day The Butthole Surfers came to Trenton, New Jersey.
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The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running dialog back and forth for the story they were writing.
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Do We All Have a Story?
To a certain extent, asking if we all get a passion is like asking if we all have a story to tell.
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An Interview with Lawrence Weschler (about how to interview, among other things)
“I generally don’t use tape recorders. I take notes and work from memory. You can use the tape recorder as an aide-memoire, but I can tell you that I have been doing this for thirty years, and I’ve never had…
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Around the World in 100 Years
The best travel writing usually begins with an absurd proposition, so how could I not pick up an attic-sale book subtitled How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day?
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Lost and Found
I first heard about Stoner back in grad school. I’d been on a Denis Johnson jag (weren’t we all?) and so naturally assumed the novel was a florid account of reefer madness. This is how Stoner begins: William Stoner entered…
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How My First Book Got Published
How many times do you really face a choice in life? How many times will you get the benefit of arriving at a crossroads, where you don’t have to fight the tug of rolling inertia, and your choice isn’t going…
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WHY I MUST GIVE UP WRITING
First let me say I’ve been a dedicated writer for half a century. I’ve published twenty-five books, and I’ve even won some prizes. I know a real writer is supposed to write for the art itself, yearning only toward self-expression