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Drama

My parents lay in long, white, woven-plastic chairs while I danced on the diving board. Behind our house was our deep in-ground pool, surrounded by grass, enclosed by a fence: how safe; how Floridian. Open sky, white patio, turquoise water slapping and chopping. And the me-girl: long legs, baby tummy, bangs in her eyes, red two-piece. “Mummy, are you looking?” I couldn’t tell. She wore dark glasses, and the sun was in my eyes. “Are you looking?”

Friend Of The Sun

Why Didn’t You Vote For Me?

A Diary Of My Presidential Campaign

I wasn’t going to run in 1996, until Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire Republican primary. For ten days, the leftist agony came over me — the certainty that Bakunin was right: the ruling class does wish to extinguish us! I saw vividly a white-supremacist army occupying the White House, closing our borders, and setting up Christian reeducation camps. I knew I had to act swiftly. So, on March 4, I declared my candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

My Father’s Place

A few days after my father, poet William Stafford, died, I was sleeping alone at my parents’ house when something woke me at around 4 A.M. My mother, who was away, had told me that she, too, had been wakened since his death at this, my father’s customary writing time.

The Clear Path To Creativity

An Interview With Dan Wakefield

The key is to clear yourself in order to become a conduit for creativity. In my book Expect a Miracle, Ann Nadel, a San Francisco painter and sculptor, said that when the work is really coming, there’s something flowing through you that’s not you. To me, that feeling is tangible proof of the existence of spirit: something we can tap into that’s beyond ourselves and our senses. The highest goal we can aspire to is to become transmitters of that.

Sunbeams

It’s very possible that your life in art — your successful life in art — might be a struggle from start to finish.

Sally Warner

When Nature Speaks

An Interview With Jim Nollman

But, once in a blue moon, we communicate with the whales in such a meaningful manner that I experience a sense of grace. That’s what communication with nonhumans is really all about. When that communication happens, no matter how subtle it is, whether or not it registers on tape or film, I feel as if I’ve been blessed. It is the greatest blessing of my life, and, in some way, it is the same experience that I see lying at the heart of religion.

Holiday Offer

Clayton

My friend Clayton died just before Christmas. He threw himself from the forty-fourth floor of the Marriott Hotel. Clayton Brooks was a poet, an actor, a taxi driver, a playwright, a drug addict, and a lover of humanity.

Selected Stories

I went to a theater to see a play. In the middle of the second act, there was a pause. The actors seemed to be waiting for something. A tall man walked up to me and whispered, “You’re in the play.”