I remember listening to “Reunion” (a very short story by John Cheever) on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast. That was actually the first time I ever heard the story. It might be the first time I was introduced to John Cheever. The reader was Richard Ford, and he noted that the story begins with 2…
Tag: Writing
Chores (Caturday Questions)
Big Cat, Little Cat: Chores It’s Big Cat’s job to sit on Human-Mom’s head during Zoom meetings. It’s Little-Cat’s job to sit on Human-Mom’s keyboard while she’s trying to write. And it’s Middle Cat’s job to sit on Human-Mom’s lap when she’s trying to get up. The key to running an effective household is that…
Lone-li-ness
寂寞 鄉下小孩子怕寂寞，枕頭邊養一只蟈蟈；長大了在城裡操勞，他買了一個夜明表。 小時候他常常羨豔墓草做蟈蟈的家園；如今他死了三小時，夜明表還不曾休止。 -卞之琳 Lone-li-ness The boy from the countryside dreaded loneliness,So he kept a grasshopper by the pillowcase;He grew up labouring in town,and bought a watch that shines all night long. As a child he’d always envied the grasshopperswho homed in the graveyard grass;Now the old boy is dead for three hours,The second-hand of…
Reality Check: The Afterlives of Indie Musicians
Zane Stroud and I used to be bandmates; we left the band and started new lives, and Zane is now heading in my direction–to become an academic. Zane and his wife Bessie drove Zoe and me to Clearwater Bay to celebrate Mid-Autumn Festival. We took this double date quite seriously, because it was our first…
What Do you Know from Funny?
The world’s great philosophers don’t fully understand funny. I discovered this in my second year of grad school. I was taking a class on the Canterbury Tales. As the semester wore on, I was more and more fascinated by Chaucer’s humor. Stop and think for the moment. If you name the top ten most influential…
The Wedding (An Archaic Concept of Me, Delivery 9)
We began in Delivery 1 with a vignette. A vignette of lingering kisses, stillness and soft murmurings, bountiful cushions on a big, round mahogany bed, privilege taken for granted, and lithe young minds congratulating each other on their own manifestations of abundance. A vignette delivered to us by a much older version of a young man…
Writing about Writer’s Block
There are times when I don’t feel like writing a weekly column. This is one of those times. So let’s talk about that. I’ve had a bunch of writing students over the years, and I’ve found that teaching writing makes me a better writer. For one thing, when you’re helping people out of their writer’s…
Thank you for your Support
Dear 2 Rules Readers, Friends, and Followers: As you know, we make a big deal about self-care here. It’s so important to our work as writers and teachers, but also to being ourselves, and being able to be the best versions of us that we can. And a number of weeks back, some things happened that…
Make it New! (Caturday Questions)
There’s a saying that’s almost exactly 30 years old that states that nostalgic repetition in pop culture follows a 30 year cycle. Hence, The Sandman came out on Netflix about 30 years after the comic finished its run in the mid-90s. And the Addams Family film (1991) came out just shy of 30 years after…
Night Fishing in Guinea-Bissau
My London-based company posted me in an isolated country in West Africa called Guinea-Bissau to buy shipload quantities of cashew nuts valued at millions of dollars from sellers of the commodity. I had to learn Portuguese fast, get the feel of the market, and find out the government requirements for the export of raw cashew…