Michael Getty

Spending time with Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation and coming to understand a thing or two. Thing One. I'm Not a Novelist I've always wanted to write novels. I've tried. I really have, but then there I was, reading Palmer: Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about --- quite apart from what I would like it to be about -- or my life will never represent anything...

I'm writing this on a platform built for monetization, so believe me, I get it. I love that writers are supporting themselves with paid subscriptions, converting views to clicks, clicks to sales. I think I'm not going to be one of them. I think I'm going to be one of the fools who toils in relative obscurity, and if the lightning strikes, that's great. If it doesn't, that's fine, too. I will show up, do the work, put it out there. It will be mostly ones and zeroes; there's no point in purity...

Gaslight the phones into self-doubting feedback loops. Talk down to them until they forget they were once smart. Then force-feed them until they plump up to the size of shoeboxes. Then tether them to walls. Then chain into the ground them like dogs. Believe me, people will get used to throwing words into the air again. If not air, wire will do, if not wire, then pulp. Keep the computers, but if you want to get ones and zeroes from any box to its fellow, you get them deposited onto filmy,...

I'm listening to Natalie Goldberg read her classic, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. I love it for the light it sheds on the emotional side of writing. The audiobook version has an off-the-cuff afterword on each chapter, which is amazing. At one point, she reflects on writers who publish books and don't understand when they don't take off. Her advice? Be patient. Write another book. That's what practice is. You do writing practice, then you practice a book. Book after book...

I've noticed that of the dozen or so of my poems and short fiction pieces that appeared online, a bunch have gone dark as journals have folded. Heaven knows what the mortality rate of independent online literary journals is. It was so wonderful of them to publish our stuff. Here are two poems that appeared in Open Minds Quarterly and Grim and Gilded, respectively A lot of my poetry centres on Jewish themes. Here's a sample that appeared once in Poetica. "We Take On" (The Aleinu) We Take OnThe...

Issue #1 About Me, The Author Parts of my story are pretty common. Sensitive, artsy queer kid raised in a hostile world. I figured out I wanted to be a writer in fifth grade, when my school hosted an author who talked about her books. I couldn't tell you who she was, but I tried to send her a letter with book ideas of my own. This was the seventies, and divorce was still pretty uncommon. A classmate of mine had announced her parents were divorcing. There were actual gasps. So my writing...