Outbuildings

Today I slid open the barn door at Susanna's farm in order to feed the donkeys, and a red fox jumped up from the straw, looked me in the eye, and then turned his snout toward the other door and ran out into the pasture, out into the rain. I felt bad that I'd disturbed the creature. I guess rain is better than snow overall, seeing we've had way too much snow already.

On the way home, I saw both of Steve Barrett's old work trucks parked in front of his shop in Comstock. (A few years ago Steve built Susanna's big pole barn, the one with the fox in it.) He bought the best building in Comstock, a big old lumber warehouse, didn't pay much for it either, so I heard. Anyway, I needed Steve and Mike to come look at the garage I accidentally purchased at the tax sale. It's swaybacked like an ancient over-used mare. Well, the bad news is that the winter's heavy snows have taken their toll, and it's leaking pretty bad, not to mention listing and rotting in spots. "You need a whole new roof, my dear," Steve said. Ideally I would get a building permit, tear it down to its cinder blocks, put up all new trusses, sheathing, shingles.

Of course I am who I am, so I begged him to consider the lesser repair, the hobbling together, the propping up, the patching. He poked his measuring tape into the soft bluish wood of the ceiling, said he'd think about the options and talk to me soon. He said it would be a real good idea to get some ten foot two-by-fours to prop under the wettest of the noodling rafters. I really thought I could get six of them in my Honda station wagon, and I did, only I shouldn't have tried to close the hatchback. The resulting crack in my windshield was bearable only because I returned home to learn my new collection, American Salvage, has been given a starred review in Booklist.

My AWP

Holy Crap. Last time I went to the AWP conference for creative writers, it was in Kansas City in the year 2000 and there were, like, maybe 2000 people. This year in Chicago there were 8000. I didn't see hundreds of people who I knew were there. Highlights included Dorothy Allison's very dirty story that might have been entitled "Frog Fucking," a real performance piece. After that, nobody else would have been able to concentrate on literature, and so it was appropriate that out came Mucca Pazza (Italian for "Crazy Cow"), a 40-piece circus punk marching band that was the most exciting performance I've ever heard and seen. Did I mention that all this took place in a giant ballroom, complete with big glass chandeliers and all the old decor, seating four thousand. The band did klezmer and mariachi and at one point a guy with a megaphone on his head played gypsy violin. Another highlight was the room reserved by Susan Ramsey on the 17th floor, with big full view of the lake and part of Millennium Park and Grant Park. Another high point was my getting to hear Robert Owen Butler use the phrase "white-hot center." And then there was Art Spiegelman speaking for 70 minutes on the history of Comix. But about those 8000 writers. Wow. That's a lot of aspiring writers, quadrupled in nine years. At this rate, we'll have 32,000 writers in year 2018. We won't be able to meet in a hotel; we'll have to take over an entire town. I worry that we're creating a big Ponzi scheme, all teaching more people to write, promising they'll be able to find work or publishing opportunities the way Madoff promised monetary returns. On the other hand, maybe all these writers will create so much incredible writing that Americans will burst out reading. Americans will turn off their TVs and Ipods and pick up their chapbooks and novels and read.