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Presently Involved
I am presently involved in two writing groups which are of interest to me on several levels. Both groups involve writing — critiquing stories, journaling. The variety and mix of men and women, mostly women, is revealing. Some come into the group tooting their own horns, revealing their writer’s resume as if a testament to their talent; others, latently, “know” they can run the group better than the leader but keep it to themselves, although their discontent exudes from them like musk. Some participants really want to learn, others crave adulation or applause; some are so needy that they attack others…
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Diastema
When the dentist labeled the marked gap between my two front teeth as “diastema,” I didn’t quite get it, thinking that he had said diaspora. After the confusion lifted, we both chuckled as I explained to this 38- year-old Mormon dentist what the diaspora was, it too, in its way, a marked gap. Here I am correcting at 69 the diastema between my front top two teeth that I have lived with for decades. My parents never did see to that or perhaps, to be fair, they had been told that it was non repairable — dentristy in the 40s being in the…
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Sandpapering
March and April have been good months for my writing. David Herrle, editor of Subtletea magazine, accepted a blog, which I revised, on first person writing (see it below). And when I sent him a copy of “Archipelago,” a perverse fantasy story, he accepted that as well. The story is one of a collection I am working on now. Jane suggested that I “field test” my stories by sending them out to literary magazines. Resisting at first, I had a chat with myself. Down to a Sunless Sea, my first collection, took me over 25 years to get published. I…
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Freud in Auschwitz
Jane suggested that I write about Freud’s possible take on the Holocaust. Exemplary idea! So I came up with the title you see above. I have not come up with a story. The self-fantasy is that it would make an avant garde or modernistic short story but the reality is that I may lack the craft to do so. I tried to jot down some thoughts about the story to be, if that. I thought of his cases — Dora, the Wolfman; I thought of his colleagues, Adler, Rank, Jung, Brill, Abraham, Ferenci: the concepts of transference and counter-transference, the…