gwynnega

I went down a soap-opera rabbit hole today, which happens from time to time. This one turned out to be fascinating but tragic.

RetroTV is currently showing the 1973 episodes from The Doctors. Peter Burnell plays young Dr. Mike Powers, son of the hospital's chief of staff. His portrayal is mercurial, defensive, vulnerable, and quirky. (Several other actors would play the role; they were more traditional leading men, but their versions of the character were flat by comparison.) In the current storyline, near the end of Burnell's run on the series, Mike has become addicted to amphetamine, which rings nasty changes on his personality. It struck me that Burnell was really good, and I looked him up, hoping to see what else he'd done with his career. Sometimes when I do these searches, I discover actors who are still working in film and TV.

Burnell was one of those classically-trained daytime/theater actors I wrote about in my novel Can't Find My Way Home. In 1975 he won the Theater World Award for his Broadway debut as Julie Harris' and Rex Harrison's son in In Praise of Love. He continued to work on and off Broadway, along with other TV and film work. His partner was film historian Gerald Mast. I found this lovely webpage about their home in Provincetown.

Burnell killed himself after being diagnosed with HIV, at the age of forty-four. Mast died of AIDS a year later. Another actor who was on The Doctors at the same time as Burnell, the handsome and urbane David O'Brien, died of AIDS in 1989 at age fifty-one. I felt haunted, today, watching these two actors in the same episode.

I'm delighted to announce that my poem "the jacarandas are unimpressed by your show of force" will be published by Strange Horizons. I wrote it last month, which was a very challenging time for me (and a very challenging time for Los Angeles and this country). Thank god for poetry, and for jacarandas. It always makes me so happy when my work appears in Strange Horizons.

I think this is the first 4th of July that I've gone to a protest. Today's Los Feliz protest was smaller than the No Kings one, but still sizable and raucous. Many motorists honked their support. (At one point there was an "ICE OUT! LET'S GO!" chant to the tune of "Blitzkrieg Bop.") I'm so glad I went. Afterwards I stopped in at Skylight Books, which had a signboard outside reading: "BRING THE HEAT. F*CK ICE."

Now I'm listening to X's See How We Are, as is my 4th of July tradition.

I got a Moderna booster this afternoon. Typically this knocks me flat for about half a day (starting in the middle of the night), and I have planned accordingly. The timing is good, because we're having a mini heatwave, and the worst of it will be tomorrow.

Yesterday I learned that Erica Jong has dementia. Her daughter Molly Jong-Fast is publishing a memoir next month, How To Lose Your Mother, and an excerpt appeared in Vanity Fair. Having lost my father to Parkinson's, I really related to Jong-Fast's essay. (My mother had memory issues towards the end of her life, but she was already in her nineties when that happened, so, as hard as it was, everything kind of felt like gravy by that point.)

As a mother, Jong apparently left a lot to be desired. But the revelation that she has dementia hit me like a gut punch, because she was tremendously important to me as a young writer. Growing up, I knew who she was, because she was very famous. I think my copy of Fear of Flying was my dad's, which I took from one of his shelves and never gave back. But the way I got into Jong's work is more mysterious.

One day when I was a senior in high school, just getting into reading and writing poetry--I'd already written a lot of fiction by that point--I found a yellow paperback in my mom's room called The Craft of Poetry (1974). It's a collection of New York Quarterly interviews with poetry heavyweights. What's weird about this is that neither of my parents were readers of poetry, and I have no idea how the book wound up on their shelves. (It didn't occur to me to ask, and now there's no one to ask.) I certainly started reading the book because Anne Sexton was one of the interviewees. I would eventually read the whole book. (I still own it.) But the interview that changed my life was Jong's. Not just because the way she talked about writing poetry was so engaging, but because that interview was like a syllabus to me. It's where I learned about Colette's Earthly Paradise (indeed, I am certain it's where I first heard about Colette), Virginia Woolf's Writer's Diary, the poems of Pablo Neruda and Denise Levertov, the biography of Theodore Roethke, and more.

Jong was, I think, the first living poet whose work I loved. (I also read Adrienne Rich for the first time around this period.) I read and reread Jong's first two poetry books, Fruits and Vegetables and Half-Lives. Her influence on me was so strong that, a couple of years later in a college poetry workshop, the professor handed out copies of Jong's "Arse Poetica" when it was time to discuss one of my poems! I devoured her novels, too; probably her third, Fanny: Being the True Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones, is the best (though I haven't read it since the 1980s), a rollicking 18th-century adventure tale told in 18th-century style.

Time went on, and I moved on to other writers and other influences. I couldn't help but notice that Jong's work began to deteriorate. Fame didn't help, I suspect (and possibly substance abuse was at play, too). I find her later novels fairly unreadable, though in 1993 she published The Devil at Large, a very good book about Henry Miller. I can imagine a Jong who didn't hit it big with Fear of Flying and whose work continued to mature. But the fact that she is now no longer the person she was--the writer who inspired me--is hard for me to fathom.

I love this photo of Jong with Eileen Myles, Fran Winant, Joan Larkin, Jean Valentine, Honor Moore, Susan Griffin, Toi Derricotte, and Anne Waldman. Not a celebrity, but a poet among poets.

There were several Hands Off! protests in Los Angeles today. Originally I was going to attend one outside the Los Feliz Library, but the Los Feliz protest got moved to the corner of Hollywood and Vermont, so I opted for the one outside the Social Security Administration in Glendale (mostly because the parking was easier). It was a good crowd, but I never felt boxed in. There were many wonderful signs (my favorite read MUSK RAT LOATHE), and passing motorists honked enthusiastically. I may have gotten too much sun.

I used to go to a lot of protests when I was younger and more able-bodied, but I just couldn't not go today. I'd forgotten what a joyous experience it can be.

At least two of my friends (that I know of) lost their homes during the recent wildfires. There was finally rain in Southern California this weekend, which was such a relief.

This morning my friend Brandon Jay, whose house burned down in Altadena, posted this amazing video of himself and his kids performing "Burning Down the House."

Brandon writes on FB: "Altadenamusicians.org will be coming soon. Our mission is to replace all the instruments destroyed in the recent California wildfires. We'll be setting up a platform where survivors list all their lost instruments like a wedding registry for instruments. Then donors can view the registries, see pictures and read stories about them and purchase and replace them, or better yet donate their extra gear to make everyone whole again."

It has been really something (especially amid the horrible political situation in this country) to see our local communities taking care of each other.

My collection of short fiction, Sinking, Singing, came out in October. Writing-wise, the year was mostly taken up by revising my novel Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, working on a sequel, and doing yet more revision of Thank You! (Fortunately, I really enjoy spending time with these characters.)


fiction

Sinking, Singing (Aqueduct Press)
Includes four original stories ("The Discography of Theodore Grayson," "A Good Cast Is Worth Repeating," "Resolution," and "De Bergerac Duels His Dragon") as well as seven reprints ("We Gotta Get Out of This Place," "Emily and the What-if Imp," "Sinking, Singing," "Beyond and Back," "The Clockwork Cat's Escape," "The Two Mrs. Mansfields," and "A Wild Patience").


poetry

"Universals" in Dreams & Nightmares #126 (January 2024)

poetry reprint

"midas" in FUMPTRUCK: Open Letters, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Artwork & Other Creations for & Inspired by the 47th President of the Divided States of America, edited by Anonymous (Written Backwards Press)

Today is the official release date of FUMPTRUCK: Open Letters, Essays, Fiction, Poetry, Artwork & Other Creations for & Inspired by the 47th President of the Divided States of America. It includes my poem "midas," originally published in Not One of Us, as well as work by a plethora of wonderful writers.

Also today, I'm on an episode of the Coffee Fueled Stories Podcast! We talk about my new collection Sinking, Singing, my novel Can't Find My Way Home, the writing process, the 1970s, coffee, and more.

My collection of short fiction, Sinking, Singing, is available from Aqueduct Press. It contains four new stories, as well as work previously published in GigaNotoSaurus, Escape Pod, Fantasy, Not One of Us, Mermaids Monthly, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, and Shimmer.

"A young girl hears unsettling messages in the grooves of an old record album. A washed-up horror star gets a second chance at stardom, but at a great price. A robot rebellion is fueled by the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde. In this collection of short fiction, some characters seek to escape (often through music or magic), while others choose to remain in the beautiful, albeit damaged, present moment."

The book, part of the Conversation Pieces series, is available from Aqueduct in paperback and ebook formats. The ebook is also available from Amazon.

It has been a trying several days since I got home from Readercon, but today's mail brought a lovely surprise: copies of my new collection of short fiction, Singing, Singing, forthcoming from Aqueduct Press this autumn. I am so happy with the cover, in all its purple finery!



[click to embiggen]

Last night I watched Harold and Maude for the zillionth time (on TCM), and now I am thinking many thoughts about Ruth Gordon, Maude, and Minnie Castevet.