Recent Work

ON SUBSTACK:

2024

ONE THOUSAND WORDS ABOUT A PICTURE
Sept 4, 1979. The map on the front paper of the Charleston newspaper looked like a game board. Hurricane David was moving across the Caribbean, and curved black arrows predicted the storm’s path...
Read More

BURNT GIRL
Words are abstractions and dreams defy description, so what we call creative writing is contradictory at its core…
Read More

MY STARRY STARRY NIGHT
I often have trouble remembering where I am, what day it is, or even which direction I’m headed in…
Read More

MY SUGAR DADDY
When I was 10 years old, a local grocery store had a Sugar Daddy wrapper contest. Whoever turned in the most wrappers would win a prize…
Read More

2023

COOK THIS POEM
First you make a roux,
You know what a roux is,
Don't you?
Read More

MY SISTER PATTY and COOK THIS POEM
I’m posting two unrelated pieces of writing on the same day. Although I love brevity, sometimes I need to juxtapose two pieces to make a certain point…
Read More

LOOK OUT!
In the early 1990s a producer at “All Things Considered” called and asked if I’d be willing to write a 3-minute essay and read it out loud on the air…
Read More

LEARNING TO WRITE
My first literary effort was a poem for my mother. In the third grade, for Valentine’s Day, I cut out a red heart from construction paper and put my thumb print on one side…
Read More

THE ELATIONS OF DANGER
The first time I left my home in South Carolina for the outer world, it was 1963, and I was 17 years old…
Read More

INNER TRAVEL
Once, when I was still living in New York, I visited a place called Tranquility to experience floatation in a sensory deprivation tank…
Read More

2022

Women With Balls – Courage in the WNBA
I don’t know why everyone hasn’t been watching women’s professional basketball, because, really, who has ever seen women behaving like this…
Journal of the Plague Year
Read More

2021

Listening
The pandemic provides an opportunity for those of us obsessed with narrative, and since I am now living so thoroughly in a stream of words, I did not even notice for two days the new carpet in our dining room…
Journal of the Plague Year
Read More

2020

It’s Always Now
The pandemic finds me dropped out once again, less advertently than in the Sixties and Seventies, staring at these spring birds flitting around, these quiet trees growing…
Journal of the Plague Year
Read More

Who the F*** are the Boogaloos?
Why don’t you write books people will want to read, my mother once asked. She’s dead now, but she would have hated my final novel, Tomb of the Unknown Racist…
Journal of the Plague Year
Read Piece

2008

3 Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers
I have always had a certain amount of trouble understanding where I am. Maybe this is because I grew up in South Carolina…
PEN/Faulkner Foundation
Read Piece

1998

Home of the Moan
The Village Voice
Read Piece