from periodicals

In April, I listened to Louis Menand's "A Lesson of Vietnam: Getting in Is Easier than Getting Out" from The New Yorker, and I read "Blood in the Game" by Francine Prose—a review of novels by Lee Clay Johnson's Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen's Fever Beach. I also enjoyed a few shorter pieces from recent print issues of The Christian Science Monitor.

Nobody is going to do it for you.

"Writers have to jump-start themselves at the moment of performance, no less than actors and dancers and painters and musicians. There are so writers who sweep us along so strongly in the current of their energy—Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers—that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch.

"You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you."

~~ from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

writing life

"I didn't expect that there would be so few reviews, and that many of them would be so negative."

SLC on writing process

"I’ve tried a lot of different processes. I first tried an output schedule with a target of five-hundred words a day. That didn’t work very well. Then I moved to the time schedule, putting in about three hours a day writing. That didn’t work very well, either. Finally, I ditched thinking about process, too. Now I do what I’ve done with most of my stories or books, I generally sit down with my laptop in my recliner and start working on whatever story I have going that draws my interest at that time. I usually have about five stories going at once, and there’s always something about one of them that is catching my eye. I dip in and start exploring around, trusting my instincts to lead me in the right direction. That sense of discovery is one of the biggest things for me as a writer. If I don’t have things to discover for myself while writing a story, then there’s nothing there for me. Any time I’ve every plotted a story out and then sat down to write it, I’ve never had a bit of luck with it. The story was already told. Doesn’t matter if it was in outline form. The story has been told and is over."

~~ from "To Be Perfectly Honest," an Interview with Sheldon Lee Compton at Cowboy Jamboree Press

Uncle Sam's Decline

“Young Zak, no clinchpoop, returned home each summer full of the best shit one might retain at school. None of that ordinary preprofessional crap, Zak studied the old school—its literatures, philosophies, and histories—the best bathroom reading found in America. He went to one of those cold New England colleges somewhere between the city and the country, where somewhere between two and three thousand potty-trained youth take more cups of coffee than classes each day. They wore holed if holistic clothes, smoked cloves, ruined lungs, fondled loves—suburban doves desperately searching for soul in Nineteenth-Century Russian Lit or Contemporary Jazz Music Crit. Up North, Zak learned to privilege the other, signify the Mother, and love not thy Father so much as thy brother. But of course, rhyme was forbidden, and by sophomore year, while his virginity pledged to remain on hand, his eyesight left without even a word of goodbye.”

Night Shift

“Once upon a time, in some summer hiatus away from secondary school, I worked my first slave. It was the graveyard stint at the Gas N Grub convenience shop. From nine at night to seven in the morning, I bagged first, rang second cashier, cashed in on $3.35 per hour—at the time, I was thinkin’ it’s all for four future years of school. Man, I see now my ass was probably worth five, six, or seven times as much. Brotha, I toiled sedulously, often fatigued, through those convenient sixty-six minute hours—boss was payin’ nine hours of cash money dough for a ten-hour shift! What with low pay, jammed register, broken slushee machine, and all them complaining coed bitties—I was an adolescent poet-to-be who’d already found his inferno.”

Sheldon Lee Compton

Sheldon Lee Compton passed on April 13, 2026. He was an author of the memoir The Orchard Is Full of Sound as well as many novels, short stories, and newspaper articles; he helped and published a wide range of writers from Ketucky and beyond. I'm grateful that he published two excerpts from the as yet unpublished Spark Park, "Night Shift" and "Uncle Sam's Decline."

a library copy tucked away with all the other invisible books

 

a tale of three Brookses

From the April 6 print issue of The New Yorker, I read Becca Rothfeld's review of a book by Arthur C. Brooks. At some point in the middle, I took a moment to scroll twitter and was immediately presented with a clip of Dillon Brooks watching a shot by Kevin Durant fly over his head. Soon after, I returned to the middle of Rothfeld's book review and for a moment found myself confused and considering that I was reading a paragraph about David Brooks because the title of the book seemed similar to one this third Brooks might write.

Jon of Havana

Jon Lee Anderson phones home from Havana: "Leonardo Padura, Cuba's best known novelist, told me about his frustrated efforts to buy a home power station for his elderly mother-in-law, to provide light when the electricity goes out."