I have come to the conclusion that love is the only thing of value in the universe; everything else is dust or loneliness. When I say love I mean knowing and understanding the nature and meaning of another person’s suffering and joy and wanting to act in ways that comfort and cultivates joy. I write to help others and myself know love.
Compassion informs my writing and gives shape and meaning to my daily life. Several years ago I read The Art of Happiness by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and decided to join AmeriCorps, taking a significant pay cut from my previous job as an instructional technology manager, so that I could work to help low-income families.
My service with AmeriCorps broadened my life experience and further cultivated my compassion. For the first year, I helped build decent, affordable housing for families with Habitat For Humanity. I discovered the peacefulness that comes with meaningful labor and gained a better understanding of my childhood experiences of being homeless.
For my second year with AmeriCorps, I lived in Brooklyn, New York and served as an advocate for low-income families in NYC Housing Projects. The work was emotionally challenging and rewarding. Among the families I worked with were children whose parents were in prison. I mentored boys who had tough prison mentalities they had learned from their mothers and fathers, kids for whom "pimp” was the highest aspiration.
I am continuing my work with at-risk youth. This year I am Youth Development Coordinator at a community center in Lexington, Kentucky. Like VanGogh who lived among and told the stories of Europe’s poor through paintings like The Potato Eaters, the impoverished urban families in this country are whose stories I have to tell. Personal experience allows me the voice.
In addition to my service with at-risk youth, I practice yoga and meditate regularly, enjoying the gifts of body and mind. These activities help me as a writer by challenging me to continually reexamine my world. My approach to writing and all my endeavors is serious but with hearty doses of playfulness and creativity.
For the past couple of years I have practiced reading one poem a day. I sit with a cup of tea for fifteen minutes or so in the morning and read silently and aloud a poem from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Robert Bly. Before Rilke, I read Songs For The Open Road edited by The American Poetry & Literacy Project in the same way. Soon I will find another poet with whom to share my mornings.
My prose reading is concentrated mostly around short stories. I subscribe to Glimmertrain Stories, Zoetrope All-story, The Sun, Night Train, Five Points and Limestone. Authors whose short story collections I have found particular enjoyable are:
My own short stories have been compared to Raymond Carver and Dennis Johnson. While I take the comparison as a compliment, my college education was not English but Engineering and I only read those writers after being compared to them. My all-time favorite short story is Joyce’s The Dead, which takes my breath away every time I read it. When I come across a short story that especially moves me, I make notes of it and study the author’s teaching. On the advice of my mentor, Jim Hall, I am currently reading stories and making notes on the question: "Why does this story have to end where it does?”
My novel reading for the past couple of years has included:
Dostoyevski’s The Idiot is my favorite novel and brought me to tears twice while reading, so that the words blurred until I stopped for a moment and wiped my eyes. Indiana, Indiana had a similar effect on me and inspired me to email Laird Hunt and tell him how his beautiful book had moved me.
I appreciate writers who challenge our perceptions and help us to celebrate our world and the miracle of existence. This is what I experience reading poetry. The stories I write are of lives outside the dominant cultural, economic, racial, and sexual structures. I intend for my stories to challenge the perceptions of some and affirm the lives of others, allowing readers to choose their own access point into the stories meaning. It is through sharing these stories, lived and imagined, that we are able to realize the nature of our being and discover love.
