paperback out next week
Carry the One has a new cover for the paperback edition. Hope you like it!
new paintings
on the paintings page, I’ve put up a couple of new canvasses in my series on vita sackville-west, with more to come. I’m trying for something like a biography in paint. it’s all narrative to me—the writing and the painting.
the hard parts
my least favorite parts of writing a novel are:
a] the very last go-over when I’m alternately weary with the manuscript and jolted with electric fear at seeing a character wearing yellow socks when a few pages earlier I’ve had them pulling on red ones
and where I am now, which is
b] the early roughing out when all my characters look like claymation figures and I’m still wondering where they’re all going.
at least I have been able to do a good bit of this here in amsterdam, looking over a canal, leading a much smaller version of my regular life.
hallowed ground
my partner and I are standing in the doorway of virginia woolf’s summer residence, monk’s house. she wrote in a cottage in the garden, had a a great number of literary [and a few romantic] conversations in the living room, and, when madness threatened to return one time too many, walked away from it, into the river ouse with stones in her pocket.
the ending of carry the one
I can see that some readers have come here looking for illumination on the ending of cto. what I would say is that the last word of the book offers a clue.
here’s a radio interview where shelagh shapiro asks me fascinating questions and I respond boringly and sound like a frog but I’m putting it up anyway.
the podcast is called Write the Book. Shelagh’s show is on WOMM-LP – The Radiator – a noncommercial low-power FM radio station located in downtown Burlington, Vermont. here it is:
