Books & Stories

As a writer, it’s sometimes hard to figure out why I didn’t write The Great Gatsby (too young? too middle class?) or I Capture the Castle (too American?) As I Lay Dying, Amsterdam, Memory Wall, anything by Alice Munro, Roxane Gay… And also Maus, White Like Me, Fun Home, Being Mortal, The Color of Water: of the course the nonfiction is lived, and I haven’t lived those lives.

I didn’t write’m but I get to read them, and I’m grateful.

There’s a poem by another woman in a journal that published one of my stories. My flash story is pretty good, 300 words, written in the second person. Her poem is five brilliant lines, written in the second person, sedate with pain and understanding, and on nearly the same theme. Such a feeling I felt, reading. Right now I’m reading a classmate’s novel, As a River, which I once read in manuscript. Such a feeling.

Whenever I meet a writer, I ask, What do you wish you’d written?