You write a book with three parts. Sure, a few critics come down hard, but mostly the book is appreciated.

[practice breathing, talk to snakes, how to suck venom from a wound]

     -february 3, 2012: “I’m getting better at branching out”

I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.

I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.

The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.

When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive

Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that. 

I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.

It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a handholding, as it is known in the office. I was sent, via Amtrak, to coddle

When I first met Dawn, I didn’t know what a lexicographer was. I had to look it up. Later I admitted I hadn’t even realized that people still made dictionaries.

“Of course they do,” Dawn

Much has been said about that smile. I'm not in the business of describing smiles.

Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets. 

Otherwise you'll end up with a mouthful of husk shards. 

Once I googled “Can you bunt in football?”  Answers.com had a helpful “Answered by the Community” reply: “No.”

Season 6, season finale: Hank Moody attends AWP. Moral tragedy ensues.

She wore a gold necklace that read “Boy Toy” and she stroked it lustily as she spoke. It was the 80s and everyone’s taste sucked. 

An excerpt from WASTE: a novel

Elvira Moon loved bowling. For four straight years, her team, the Blooming Broads, dominated the women’s league, decimating all opponents until Big Tina quit to start her own team, the South Side Splitters, with that bitch Claudia from Couscous or whatever country she’d arrived from in a banana crate. 

He was riding down the street like you, contramano, and the image came of you on your bike, and I wished for the dream of the flying bicycle to return, the one where I find you again. 

When Sophie arrived home from the Strange Charm concert, she realized she was now in possession of an uncomfortable secret. The next day at work it replayed in her mind at least a hundred times. 

[Previously on... Part 7  |  Part 6  |  Part 5  |  Part 4  |  Part 3  |  Part 2  |  Part 1]