Stuff From Last Week #04

Graduation, More Coltrane, Salter, Bookstores.

First, a wobbly sunset.

Last week, at UMass, we celebrated our graduating class of Poets & Writers, as we call them. We got together in a covered bandshell during a light rain and heard excerpts from three years of hard work, wandering, false starts, refocused attention, and commitment. There’s plenty to feel down about in both the publishing and academic worlds. Still, last week was a good reminder of what dedicated spaces for the arts can achieve. Thirteen young writers read from their thesis. None of them sounded the same. All of them will publish books, someday, in different settings. Big Five, micro, chapbooks, independent. Some may even start their own collectives. Who knows. They are already publishing in journals and online venues. I mostly work with the aspiring short story writers and novelists. It always nice to hear the poets, to see their brilliance.

When I was a student at UMass, in this same MFA program, about ten years ago, it was clear that the poets ran Western Massachusetts. They were doing the most exciting work, reading the strangest stuff, hosting events, and creating self-sustaining communities of weirdos. I learned plenty from my fiction workshops and seminars. I learned the coolest stylistic stuff, however, from the poets. As the fiction publishing landscape gets more corporate and homogenized, maybe it’s time us prose writers learn more from the poets than how to play with style on the page.

Finally, coming back to Amherst after several years in the wilderness has confirmed that we all have artistic homes, places where our creating feels most inspired. My writing and pedagogy is relaxed and comfortable after some tense years. I hope all artists are able to find their artistic homes and, hopefully, can remain as long as possible.

Congrats, Class of 2026, can’t wait to read your books.

COLTRANE UPDATE

I made it beyond A Love Supreme. Yes. It’s still the best, the peak, I think. BUT, maybe it’s Stellar Regions? I will report back. I can say, though, that the pure experimental overblowing spiritual cacophony stuff doesn’t get me going. I like a bit more order, I think. Sure, I’ll use a Joyce example. I think Ulysses is better than Dubliners, but I think Dubliners is better than Finnegans Wake.

WHITE SOX UPDATE

We’re above .500! We don’t suck! We’re fun!

BRIEF THOUGHTS ON AI

The recent AI scandal and the growing list of AI scandals across the writing community doesn’t depress me, exactly. It had made me feel grateful for all the serious-minded artists I know who believe making singular art, trying to compose characters and sentences in a unique way, is the purpose. In our MFA program, we have to think about publishing, finding agents, whether to go corporate or small, what the difference means, whether to stay in wacky academia or find stability elsewhere, those conversations are necessary and bring some darkness and pressure to the practice. Mostly, we’re messing around with words on a page, trying to make them beautiful and trying to say stuff no one has said before. Why would we let a computer take that fun away from us? I’m not wholly against AI as a life tool. This morning, for example, I asked AI for a list of good white wines in 2026. If all these programs were shut down tomorrow, my day-to-day wouldn’t change much. I don’t work in tech. I don’t work at a law firm, or for a hedge fund. I make sentences and characters and talk to other writers about sentences and characters because making up stuff helps me better understand myself and the world, gives me a manufactures lens for history and human experience. I can’t let a robot do that for me. My brain would stop churning. And, no one wants that.

BOOKSTORE UPDATE

Speaking of sentences! I went to Bronx River Books yesterday. I saw my first book on the shelf, which is always fun. Six years later and this thing I wrote for my MFA thesis is still hanging around.

More important, however, I picked up my first James Salter novel. And, wow, these sentences.

Finally, after going to a Brooklyn Cyclones game with my friends, I stopped by Trouble Sleep on Sixth Avenue, a great used bookstore with a good foreign language selection. I got some books in Portuguese. I also found this first edition hardcover of Ray, possibly the book I’ve read most. It was on the shelf, humbly. I walked out of there like I was holding an armful of stolen rubies. Sure, it’s only a book. Admittedly, not even close to a perfect book. Maybe a robot can write something like Ray. Still, Barry Hannah wrote this, when he was still a destructive mess, when he couldn’t write long books because he couldn’t stay sober enough to sit with a long plot, when he described his sentences and inspiration as electricity, real human electricity, biological, zapping his brain and putting Ray on the page, a fallible human character written by a fallible human author. Who cares if a robot can do that? Barry Hannah did it. Someday, a young human writer will do something just as cool and original. That’s the point.