My students appeal to me: how do you balance your teaching, your activism, and your writing life? I say, “I don’t—not at the moment.” They probably don’t believe me. I don’t want them to. It scares me to realize how remote “real” writing feels just now. Long … [Read more...]

Everywhere we go people want to know who we are so we tell them we are the union mighty, mighty union…. It's a time of intense learning about human behavior. By late Wednesday afternoon, you might have thought the helicopters were about to begin … [Read more...]

This past week… On the eighth day of rain, weather came through the kitchen wall. I looked up from the student manuscript I was writing comments on and saw the wrinkles and bubbles where the new coat of latex paint was being attacked from underneath. I put my … [Read more...]

Nobody knows he is tired. Nobody knows he is hot. We are all swung into the most intense and natural organization I have ever seen. These men are on the spot, acting on their own, visible and known within the city, acting outwardly and militantly for all, and they … [Read more...]

Today, October 4, a one-day general strike was observed in France. Upon hearing of it on the evening news, I reflexively started reviewing the reasons why such a thing could never happen here. For one thing, so few people are unionized that there’d be no way to … [Read more...]

So, I’ve been reading Thoreau’s “Walking” with Imagining Reality (my creative nonfiction class).” It’s the essay that contains that famous declaration: “[I]n Wildness [not ‘wilderness,’ as it’s commonly misquoted] is the preservation of the World.” After an … [Read more...]

I teach creative writing to undergraduates at a certain liberal university in the heart of Greenwich Village (the one that keeps changing its name). It has long been apparent to me that much of this university's thinking about what constitutes good teaching in its … [Read more...]

Here I sit, sweltering in yet another mid-September day on which temperatures were supposed to reach ninety degrees and probably did. We’re in a terrible drought, the trees and bushes in Prospect Park more exhausted-looking than I’ve ever seen them. Tomorrow is … [Read more...]

“It looks like the hull of a slave ship,” Rev. Jesse Jackson remarked, commenting on images of destitute, immiserated African-American flood victims abandoned in New Orleans. Last week, as the magnitude of the socially constructed horror that piggybacked on that … [Read more...]

Nothing (not even sex) is more outlandish, more bizarre, than the fact of death as a consequence of birth. That we should become aware, should suffer, should strive, learn, build up our brains, attach ourselves to beloved others—then have to give it up. Nothing … [Read more...]