Author Archives

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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.

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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.

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hallowed ground

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.