Starved after teaching, I ate dinner at the nearest bar. Fried shrimp and potato wedges. The bartender was blowing up blue balloons, for the Giants, and an officer sent a shot of whiskey over.  I didn’t realize it was a cop bar. I hate shots. I thanked the officer, and sipped the...

Everyone who speaks “in conversation” at the New York Public Library is asked for a seven word bio. “Seven words that define you.” Joan Didion’s seven words were, “seven words do not yet define me.” Her most recent book, Blue Nights, is about the death...

Originally published in the New York Times, Sunday, February 27th, 2011 JEAN MEYER, a business student at Columbia University and a founder of Datemyschool.com, an online matchmaking service, believes modern ambition is the death of love. Enlarge This Image Standing at the bottom of...

Given the dark nature of my thesis, my professor said, “A question to ask yourself is why you are dead-set on pursuing and understanding [insert details of story I can’t reveal here].” This question, the haunting fog around every step of the investigation process for this story. I...

NY –> Staunton–> Roanoke –> Knoxville –> Nashville –> Memphis –> Chattanooga –> DOLLYWOOD –>Birmingham –> New Orleans. Or something like that. I’m relying on maps and my GPS, Joanie. (My  Civic is S. S....

Hemingway once wrote a six-word story: “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.” He is said to have called it his best work. Literary legend holds that the story was the result of a bar bet. There is no factual evidence of this, nor of the story’s physical existence. But who cares. The...

 Photo by Frederic Lewis, Hulton Archive. It’s hard to mention the street where I live, where I all but live, without referencing the gates of hell. The gates of hell, near the Times building … No, you’re on the wrong corner. Make a left. If I didn’t work and go to school here,...

I’m reading in the Polestar series this Sunday, May 1st, at Cake Shop. 5 p.m. 52 Ludlow Street, NYC. Free.  DOOLITTLE : POEMS INSPIRED BY THE PIXIES’ EPIC...

The past few weeks have been both trying and wonderful. I landed in the ER, then in surgery, with what I can only refer to — at this point — as Smurf Syndrome. I wrote about Smurf Sydrome in a perpetual state of observing/living/observing myself live (while on antibiotics and...

I was given 3 different sleeping medications to try as samples. I am chronicling them on my Tumblr. I may post the longer ones here, from time to time. —Ambien, Day 3 I no longer know when I’m sleeping. It seems I exist in the space between, pressing through plastic layers, trying to...