Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

  For What It’s Worth … I am a Poet. My job is writing poems, reading them out loud, getting them printed, studying, learning how to become the kind of man who has something of worth to say. It’s a great job. Naturally, I’m starving to death…. --Lew Welch--             In the Spring of '97, I started seeing The Withdrawals on a regular basis.  I was single, making a decent chunk of change, and really didn't enjoy hanging out by myself.   So, like I was still in college, I went trolling for live music.   Nothing compared to the live experience of dancing, getting to know the regulars, the songs, and eventually the band.   Being a regular fan broke down the myth that separated them from me, the artist from the fan.   When my only experience of art was in a museum, a big auditorium, a published book, a radio station, the artist seemed somehow different, somehow speci...

On Being a Writer                 I’m not sure why, but at an obviously weak moment when I was 17 years old I sat down at my desk and wrote a story.   And after no editing, revising, creative writing classes, or real encouragement from any real writers or teachers, no ambition, discipline or any reasonable degree of aptitude  announced –to myself mostly –and my best friend, “I want to be a writer.”                 I wish I’d never uttered that phrase.   Some ____ years later, I’m saddled with the weight of that phrase.   I had no idea what I was getting into.   I mean, this is America.  No one really writes anymore, or at least how I imagined writing to be.   Stephen King or Mary Higgins Clark don’t write; they work:  8 hours a day, complex formulas, books out on deadlines, b...