Recent Work

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SELECT WORKS FROM 2024

REVISITING HURRICANE HUGO, 1989
Pictures won't tell you......
So many vicious hurricanes have hit the United States recently that it can be hard to imagine what it’s like to endure and survive such events. Here is a piece I wrote for the New York Times Sunday Magazine after Hurricane Hugo ravaged my hometown of Charleston, South Carolina in September 1989.
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THE GHOSTWRITER
- a short story by William Lychack
I’m reading a short story called “The Ghostwriter” by William Lychack, and it’s from a volume of his called The Architect of Flowers. Last week I read to you a story called “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” by Richard Bausch, and afterwards Lychack wrote me a note saying that hearing me read that story aloud while he was still in college and considering trying to become a writer had been a crucial moment for him. Yes, I’m proud to say, Bill Lychack was once my student.
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DO INDIVIDUAL STORIES STILL MATTER?
.... Speculations of a Literalist
The poet Sylvia Plath wrote: The world is blood-hot/and personal, and yes, of course it is, but so what? Telling individual stories is foundational to literary narrative; when we read stories, we need characters to help carry us in. Yes, but into what? Into a reality that is only conjured by 26 letters and a space bar, if we are reading in English.
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ON HETEROSEXUAL GROOMING
Were you groomed too?
I was groomed to be a heterosexual woman but it didn’t work.
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GIRLS WILL BE BOYS, Redux
Not My ALLURE Magazine Version......
Thirty years ago an editor at Allure Magazine asked me to write a piece for them and I said sure since I was always broke and knew how well they paid. She named the topic: Gender Confusion, added a healthy sum, and said, “Can you write about this subject without saying you’re a lesbian?”
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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...
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BURNT GIRL
Words are abstractions and dreams defy description, so what we call creative writing is contradictory at its core…
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MY STARRY STARRY NIGHT
I often have trouble remembering where I am, what day it is, or even which direction I’m headed in…
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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…
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2023

COOK THIS POEM
First you make a roux,
You know what a roux is,
Don't you?
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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1998

Home of the Moan
The Village Voice
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