December 30, 2017

This year I did not, as in years past, compose a Christmas letter. Never felt a sufficiently reflective mood. Venice and Ireland were the stand-outs as far as travel, though I was too sick to enjoy Ireland much and the demon seized me in Venice. On the subject of the demon, it’s hard to know what to say, as to speak of it or to think of it is to summon it. It has receded-- at times, I think, almost to nothingness-- though there are still moments when sickening images come to my head and I know there is no reason for it but the demon wanting to behold itself. It is the strangest thing, the thing I would not have believed had I not experienced it for myself. There are demons, or at least parasites of the spirit, who do harm and whose harm, apparently, must be endured until they, like viruses, weaken and fade back into the pattern. I hope someday I read this and wonder what the hell I was talking about. I did not know anybody, except in literature, likewise afflicted, so there was no conversation to see me through. Prayer avails in the bible, but it didn’t avail here, except if you take the larger picture, which on the darkest nights I was not able to do.

Published Peniel, saw Night Music and Uranium 235 on the stage. Uranium was done right by its production, and was kind of wonderful. Was included in this year’s “Best American Poetry,” though I see inclusion is every bit as odd and arbitrary as exclusion has been these last decades. Acted in an unsatisfying production of The Great Gatsby. It was unsatisfying because everyone was notching their actor’s belts rather than bringing their characters to life. And the boys in the dressing room made me feel very old. And never did that drive seem longer. Perhaps that is the end of all that. These are the things that stick in mind without my leafing back through the pages. More recently, Q has come into my life, maybe the first person who ever read my stage work critically and with the intention of participating in its realization. I’m an excellent reviser typically denied the opportunity to revise. Producers have put on my plays or they have not, but almost never provided useful critique. 

Weathered at least two public crises by keeping my mouth shut.

Gratitude to Sam, to Q, to the Wednesday night bunch, to the boys who came to my office to talk about their lives; to the people who worked so hard producing my plays.

Preparing for the party. One cheesecake failed miserably–a frisbee or a stiff golden pancake-- the other I won’t be able to judge until it’s cut. I think me as party planner is the oddest image in the world. And yet, here we are---

December 29, 2017

KK came to the studio and looked over what I have and pronounced it not only sufficient, but perhaps enough for some process of selection.  I feel better about the show. I know from the way I feel after one trip up those stairs that I will not be able to assemble, tote, set up the show by myself. We’ll cross that bridge when it fully materializes. KK brought his beautiful-eyed son, who had a camera around his neck, doing a school project. A crowd entered my studio all at once, responsive and curious. I was happy. I am at core and essentially a teacher.

December 28, 2017

Strangely social morning at the High Five. Met the guy–Ryan–whom I’ve watched reading complicated books the last several months. He wants to be a writer and wants to know if I have any advice. He doesn’t know me, but sees me writing all the time. “Do you like to write?” he asks. I don’t have an uncomplicated answer.  What he saw me writing today was a new scene for the play I began in Omaha, which, pulled from the mothballs, moves forward on greased wheels. I’m getting less done in my vacation time than I think I ought. I blame the remarkable cold for my listlessness. Cities of the north are at thirty below zero. Brilliant winter light deceives us into stepping outside.

December 27, 2017

Afternoon declining toward evening, bitterly cold. Spent as long as I could at the studio. Though there is some heat, the cold eventually becomes debilitating, and one would rather hibernate than paint. Making progress, without any idea of how much progress is enough.  Ordered $400 worth of framing.  Recommenced work on my Paris play. Made a casserole for Sunday night. Would I be able to live like this?

December 26, 2017

Boxing Day. Waiting for Brad to decide if he is going to visit or not– reminds me of when we were roommates, and he exuded the same will-he-or-won’t-he-aura, failing to show or sauntering in when he pleased with the same insouciance. Time did not break him of this, and I think it is beautiful. My guess is that he never met anyone who didn’t adore him, or if he did, he didn’t notice. Two bouts of painting ahead of my show, one in the morning, and one quite rare in the evening. The evening one ended in weeping, for I realized I was painting Titus the Cat crossing the rainbow bridge into Eternity. How long has he been gone, and I still can’t think of it?

December 25, 2017

Heroic Christmas sleep, not entirely detached from bed and slumber until nearly 11 AM. The service at All Souls last night was sweet and mellow, a crescent moon hanging above, mostly concealed by the winter clouds.  My voice disappeared on the last hymn. This is a self-protective Christmas, an exhausted animal creeping into its den for restorative hibernation. Another way to look at it is that I have completely failed as a human being, not having answered the phone for two days, not having put up a single holiday decoration. 

Bread rises down in the kitchen. I started baking without checking to see if I had enough flour. I didn’t. Who knew that Walgreen’s would be open on Christmas, and that it would carry flour? Gathering strength--

December 24, 2017

I look over at 62 festooned with Christmas lights, imagining that the old house itself is happy to have a family in it again.

Morning service, brief and painless. The day inclines toward the night. Christmas melancholy, a little sad, a little merry.

December 23, 2017

Much writing in High Five before full light. Excellent day at the studio. I was not tired at the end of it, but defeated by wet paint and nowhere open to work on another painting. Invited studio visitors to the All Souls Christmas Eve service.  John at Blackbird Frame set my circle painting up with a hanging apparatus for free, I suppose in the spirit of Christmas.

My present count suggests five full length plays written in 2017. There’s time for one more if the fuse is suddenly lit.

Found the first 10 seasons of Project Runway on You Tube. I may never leave this chair.

Much sadder earlier in the day than I am now. Good for living, less good for solemn composition.

December 22, 2017

Russell and DJ and I to the cinema to see The Last Jedi. Enjoyed every minute of it, never thought of it again until this minute. Is that the difference between art and entertainment? When entertainment is done, it’s done. The film maybe goes a little too far in the heroizing of the female, which becomes a familiar (if reversed) sort of fantasy, as apt to malignancy as its complement. The Female Warrior trope has power only when it is an exception. Giant hamburgers after, at the finish of which I vowed never to eat again.

December 21, 2017

Solstice. The dark will not be darker now.  Sang S’s “Personent Hodie” last night. I was sitting beside him and heard that he was not singing exactly the notes he had written. A former version? A revision? I thought it was a wonderful moment of creation.

Tchaikovsky’s “Cherubim Song.”

Excellent work at the studio, from which I came home annihilated but content.

Maud seems to have righted herself. There is no God but God. 

December 20, 2017

Went to some of the usual places online trying to submit my plays. Choices are sparse. On the NYC Playwrights blog FIVE opportunities are for women or female-identified playwrights only; two are only for New Yorkers, and the vast majority for 10 minutes plays. Quality counts, but less than a dozen other factors. I am a singer in the Land of the Deaf.

The most dazzlingly brutal, partial, cruel, and self-serving bill in my lifetime is shoved through Congress by the Republican Party, which can hardy dispute an appellation as the party of unearned privilege.  The tax “reform” was done with ruinous haste so a failed Presidency could claim some legislative accomplishment. It favors the wealthy in ways so bold you would believe it was a joke if someone described it to you in a less gruesome time. The lawmakers have made sure they and their donors reap the benefits, and hardly bother to deny it, insisting (tongues in cheeks I suppose; they can’t actually believe it) that the richer they get the more will shower down upon us. Not one Republican had the courage to stand up against this monstrosity. Not one.  Polls show the vast majority of American citizens stand against it, but the citizens that matter, and the only ones that matter, are those that bought the legislators their seats. We are clearly and beyond debate an oligarchy ruled by an infantile madman abetted by ghouls and parasites. I have lived to see the end of the American Century, and I don’t like it. I would incite an insurrection if I could cross the street without getting drowsy.

December 19, 2017

Woke unusually close to a feeling of physical well-being. I must have slept quite well. Last night when I set the cats’ food out, Maud ate greedily. I expected her to throw it up, but she did not. Great joy. I want her hungry and greedy again. I prayed for her recovery. A prayer answered, even for a day, is more shocking than almost anything.

Finished the first draft of my space play. I revise as I go, so a second complete draft is unlikely.

Lunch with Q. He confirmed my expectations by saying that TBC at Magnetic is awful. His word, “awful.” He said “Maybe every tenth joke landed.” I last saw it years ago, when every third joke landed. He said that I have a remarkable talent for keeping out of my own way as a writer, by which he indicated my lack of the need to tell my own story. He is right. Many of my characters are a bit of me, none very much. The part he’s playing in Night Music comes closest, but he plans the steps ahead of him, and I almost never do.

Huge naps with lovely, lighthearted dreams.

December 18, 2017

Maud is ill. Perhaps she is dying. I’ve been through this with five cats, none of whom granted me the mercy of quick passing, but all of whom lingered and lingered, finding places to hide with their faces against the wall, purring a little when I held them in my desperate grief. It usually, since I think of it, happens at Christmas. She lives on the countertop now. I turn the faucet on to drip, because it has always been her pleasure to drink out of the faucet, and that seems to be about the only pleasure left. I try not to think of it. If I think of it I crumble into a sort of hopeless, infantile grief, crying to the Darkness for gifts it never has given and never will give. She could get better. They never did before. To take them to the Vet is to accelerate things, to hear the words “cancer” or “sarcoma” and be dragooned into making decisions that do not, in this state of ignorance, yet need to be made. She has not said, “Let me go.” A month ago I must have sensed this, for I held her and said, “Little spirit, do not leave me.” Of all creatures on earth, Maud is dearest to me. I cannot explain why this is. Only that the Darkness knows where to strike.

A penny fell on my drive. I do not pick it up, because at night in the lamplight it gleams the most beautiful red-gold.

Cantaria afternoon concert better even than Saturday night, my poem a particular hit. I was in better voice in the afternoon. Ironically, my voice is crystal now that I do not have to use it. I baked Will cookies as his secret Santa. Whoever mine was gave me a child’s coloring book. How to interpret that? The popular music that makes me impatient works with the crowd, I must admit, though most people’s favorite was the Biebl “Ave Maria.”

Good work on the space play. Exhaustion hovers over me like a too-big coat.  Sleep, rise up and achieve as long as I can, sleep again. Dormi ancora.

Tried to go to rehearsal tonight, but the venues were locked. I’d read the schedule wrong. Drove for a long time with my lights off, wondering why it was so hard to see. That is also a recurring dream.

December 16, 2017

Baking cookies in the morning before the sun rose. Painted well for a couple of hours, returned, slept, baked more cookies. In the evening it was the Cantaria Lessons and Carols. The audience was huge and joyful, and we did our part, I think, to raise the profile of Christmas across this saddened land. I was in bad voice–or rather in voice that wavered between frog and acceptable-- and could hardly hold the music for inflammation (having taken pills too long before). Is this the pattern? Every gesture a sacrifice? Still--

December 15, 2017

Nap dream: I’m at a phone booth set in the middle of a Van Gogh meadow. I’m talking to MH, and she’s counseling me on relationships–with people I do not seem to know in waking life. She said, “People have a tendency, when they’re talking to you, to tell you their aspirations rather than the truths of their lives. This leaves you with an elevated impression of everyone you know.” Made sense in the dream and makes a kind of sense now.

Coffee with J at High Five, where we, among other topics, inevitably rehash the Magnetic debacle. We both have come to the conclusion that secrecy–people nursing bad feelings rather than exposing and working them out– lies at the bottom of a situation otherwise pretty much irrational. I thought of Blake’s “The Poison Tree.” They held their resentment in secret. They laid traps before S’s feet, and were glad when he fell in. We both confessed to not hearing gossip and therefore being taken by surprise by it.  Worked on my space play. 

Good morning in the studio– finished one big painting, revised and finished another, worked on a few small pieces, turned a postcard Bekka sent me into a “work.” I have no idea why I’m good at painting, even as good as I am. There was no clue in early life. 

Dark toward evening, Slept mightily in the middle of the day. Must begin now to hydrate to make sure my voice is fit for rehearsal tonight.

December 14, 2017

Almost immobile with inflammation. Shoulders and elbows useless. Lower back pain kept me from standing up through most of the morning. Not feeling the good life. Throat so raw I couldn’t talk, much less do the singing I had to do later in the evening. In the afternoon I trembled into the bathroom and took ibuprofen. The inflammation all but disappeared. I was like a man dying of thirst lying beside a stream, too witless to roll over and take a drink. At 6:30 the throat cleared. All right, then, on we go. 

December 13, 2017

Alabama rejoins the Union.

Handsome blue-eyed boy comes to fix my front door lock. He observes that the deadbolt had been inserted backwards. He takes a tour of the house. Circe adores him.

A student gathers a list of my “famous quotes” during intro to creative writing. I actually did say most of them:

Quotes by DH : Creative Writing Fall 2017

“Art never lies.”
“If you are in a prison then it is your duty to escape.”
“If somebody gives you an ignorant critique then just ignore it. It might be a wrong critique now, but the right critique at 6 tonight.”
“Believable dialogue is not the same as real dialogue. You could write down a conversation that you hear on the street and it might sound fake.”
“Something that is short always needs to be shorter. Things that are long always needs to be longer. If you write a haiku someone will always find a syllable that doesn’t need to be there.”
“There are no literary prodigies.” 
“Technique is the test of sincerity.”
“The highest fiction is that which is true to the author.”
“To me, imagination trumps experience.”
“People aren’t always born great, sometimes it accidentally happens.”
“Beware of decoration within writing.”
“You are confined by ropes of sand.”
“You have to get past yourself, but also into yourself to actually see.”
“You have the power as creative writers to have people to want to eat their children.”
“If anybody thinks quality is enough, they are crazy. It is right place, right time.”
“Nobody alive today has gotten anywhere on pure quality.”
“look around and notice good discourse.”
“Pre-writing might confine you within that character.”
“In poetry, communication comes after understanding.”
“Art allows artists to communicate things they don’t understand themselves.”
“Sincerity does not matter in poetry”
“Poetry is miraculously swift.”
“For you to have tragedy there has to be things that you cannot get over.”
“Comedy is tragedy plus one day.”
“Villanelles are games that you just have to play.”
“Mediocre poetry is this or that, but good poetry is this and that.”
“I want you to be scientists of imaginations.”
“A good poem makes a discovery.”
“I refute people who don’t like poetry with a wave of the hand.”
‘If you don’t eat donuts what do you eat?’ “Radishes”
“Today I failed to eat worms.” 
“Isn’t the vagina more poetic than inoculation?”
“Hello class” -Everyday
“I really eat a bag of radishes a day.”

December 12, 2017

Hysterical student running like a mouse from door to door squeaking “I missed my exam! I missed my exam!” Neither did she come later that day, into any piece of which we might have fitted her exam. Stream of messages from faculty whose ear she bent. Solution: do not sleep through your final exam. If you do, realize it is YOUR problem, and not the universe’s.

The actor who drops out of Night Music,  a few hours before read-through, is G’s son. We dodged a bullet on that one.

Cold. One brief squall of falling snow.

December 11, 2017

Dream in which I was on a camping trip with my cousin Patrick. We were so happy, and I was so happy to be with him. In real life we barely said a word to each other. What road is the dream world laying down?

A few hours downtown after our last tumultuous creative writing session. The Cantaria meeting went well. I thought I was going to be told to shut up and put up, but it turns out everyone felt the same as I, and was just waiting for somebody to speak first.

America waits for Alabama to do the right thing. What a desperate state of affairs that is! Perhaps it is a limitation on the breadth of my thought, but I am incapable of believing that anybody genuinely takes abortion as their central, sometimes singular, moral issue. I try to figure out the code. I try to imagine what they really mean.

December 10, 2017

More snow in the night, at times so thick it looked like mist. Most of it gone now, the beginning of another night.

Why does it never occur to choral conductors that the answer to the question, “Why are you dragging?” is sometimes, “because you’re going too fast”?

Huge progress on the space play. Baked a batch of cookies for my creative writers. Dodged the carpet salesmen who have dogged me from Istanbul.

December 9, 2017

Snow continues to fall, though what’s already fallen appears to be compacting, so it doesn’t get that much deeper.

Early afternoon: a gleam of sun from the south, too late to save Lessons & Carols at the Cathedral, which is cancelled, or my reading at the Black Mountain Museum, which is rescheduled to next Saturday, when it conflicts with the Cantaria Christmas Concert. .

I was sitting on the toilet worried that, after a couple of brief power outages, the furnace breaker might have been thrown, when there was a great noise and cloud of snow, which was a limb of my pine crashing down upon and annihilating the wooden fence. At that second the furnace came on, so the relief of one thing counterbalanced the horror of the other. The limb fell completely out of the street, so my duty to the community upon this point is done. Did get out and drive a little. My own driveway was the worst of it. Want to work on my play, but can’t stay awake long enough.

December 8, 2017

Oddest dreams before waking. I was in a kind of hospital for those who were self-destructive, only I didn’t remember being self-destructive. Russell was there, too, and we owned a car in common, but for some reason we couldn’t get to it to make our getaway. They calmed us by giving us stories to read, but the stories kept folding back on themselves, as though to come to a crisis or to end would damage us in some way.  I was frustrated because I knew something was wrong but couldn’t find anyone to whom to put my case. Pretty much my actual life, now that I think of it.

Vast snow had been falling as I slept, and though we got to school for our exam, the city has closed down since. Meeting with B and S about the commission atrocity is postponed. First production meeting of Night Music is postponed.  Any attempt to get to the studio is thwarted.

One of the worst days ever for muscle cramps. My hands cramped as I was trying to grade exams. Whole body fell into an agonizing rictus on the toilet at school. That was an interesting moment. At one point my wrist flattened with a muscle doing what I couldn’t imagine. You drink and you drink, and you curse into the snowy air.

Washington Place is a semi-finalist at the O’Neill.

December 7, 2017

Never asked my parents how they felt about Pearl Harbor. My mother was seventeen.

December 6, 2017

Voice lasted through rehearsal. Got to sit with Janis, which was lovely. Making headway on the sci-fi play. Night Music cast almost as I would have done it. Excellent, though quite brief, bout of painting. An ancient work is finally in its final form. Comparing Steve’s loss of his theater with my loss of the 20th anniversary gig: I feel terrible enough, whereas his loss was levels and levels of magnitude greater. That he was able to rise in the mornings was laudable.

December 5, 2017

Thought for a moment I did nothing today but sleep, though in fact I began a new play (a sci fi play; I’m all the time nagging about there being so few sci fi plays). I had a final conference with M about his senior project, a very elaborate and warlike science fiction novel. He is student body president at Owen and has a full scholarship to Brown. Talking with him I couldn’t help smiling at his almost absurd excess of energy and presentness and promise. Then supper (under deep rain, beside a rising river) at the French Broad Supper Club, a lovely restaurant welded out of railroad cars, with the Ks, which I accepted in lieu of payment for my painting of the bladder campion. I think of them whenever someone brings up the subject of a solid, lasting, and workable marriage. Did some antiques shopping, but hated everything I saw. Email says K has been “dismissed” from Cantaria. Never heard of that before, though K is toxic, always has been, and I’m sure the reasons, whatever they be,  are sound. 

December 4, 2017

Feathers floating at the edge of my pond. I assume a hawk got a dove.

Went to my office to get some grading done on Saturday. There was an odd fluttering, a ghostly murmur in the room which I couldn’t figure out until I saw a wren perched on the edge of a bookshelf. I opened the window, left the room long enough for him to find the way out. I felt for the little soul. I thought he was me, in some way difficult now to expound.

Downtown yesterday to see Maria in Twelve Dates of Christmas. The play is nothing, but her performance was dynamic and flawless, her concentration superhuman. A merry company to the Capella rooftop afterwards. Girls in fringed flapper dresses were having their pictures taken. I could hardly walk from the theater to the hotel, and then from the hotel to my car. Do I wait for this to right itself?

December 3, 2017

The cleaning ladies, for some reason, turned the litter box around so that the entrance was against the wall and inaccessible to the cats. I didn’t notice until today. The cats chose the guest room carpet to take their dainty craps on, and dips in the plastic surrounding unopened L L Bean parcels to deposit their urine. I report this because it is unexpected.

Trying to write, trying to mark papers, my hands clawed up in agonies of cramps. You sit and with your eyes narrowed, tears of pain squeezing from the edges.. You don’t know whom to strike.

First day of auditions for Night Music. We could cast it easily from those who showed up this afternoon.

Maud back in vomit mode.

December 2, 2017


Off to school last night to take in Sophie’s Winter Dionysia. It was gallant, sweet, a lovely idea. There were belly dancers. I think you have to be straight to get much thrill out of that. The centerpiece was a new student translation of Medea performed in HLH. Good translation, bad performance. If the speakers cannot be heard, all is lost, and there’s no reason to continue. Medea himself–yes himself– could be heard well enough. I can see an all-male cast, in the ancient tradition, but the other women were women, as was King Creon. Medea was twice the size of Jason. The Nurse was actually quite good. Quinn told me of the boy playing Medea. He is one of those who insists on being called “they” because neither “he” nor “she” takes in the fullness of his self-identity. The day when I call one person “they” will not come. What a thing to imagine, that you have or should have power over how others perceive you, over how others identify you. But, most of us grow out of our most vivid absurdities.

Received a thank-you note from the Washington Place people for the receipt of my play– two years after I sent it.

Up early, facing a busy day. Night Music auditions this afternoon. I swear I will find something not to be grumpy about.

December 1, 2017

Because of the cleaning ladies, I drove to Marshall to see Amy in her bar, which I should have done a while ago. Marshall is a quiet, sweet place, determined to be itself, and I can see how one might be content there, granted the several roads leading back into the world.  We chatted, in part about the possibility of doing a little theater there, possibly in her space, which is mostly empty. We reminisced about Ellen and shared our sadness that she turned her back on us. Ate lunch, strolled, bought a book. I’d parked in the bank parking lot and looked around for the bank, which had moved out a while back. The town is essentially a ghost town, which has its charms.

Q has arranged a production of Antigonus with the drama club for next semester. Only his drill-like energy could have made that happen. The Theater Department has erstwhile backed away from me and my work as though we were a spider. I think this will be joyful.

Cantaria– that is to say, a committee of Cantaria-- commissioned a new piece for our twentieth anniversary. They did not choose me for lyricist. I know the work of the man they chose, and the whole enterprise is, now, beyond ludicrous. It’s like Pope Julius, with Michelangelo in his household, roaming the Roman streets looking for someone to do the chapel ceiling. Some of us have assumed ownership of the group for far too long, making decisions that are not ours to make on the basis of expertise or sensitivities we do not have. Now that I think of it, my not being on the commission committee was itself absurd, as, so far as I know, I am the only one there who has ever received and worked through a commission.  What do I do now? Leave? It would save me a solid chunk of time.  Will I be able to perform through the curtain of contempt and violation? Will I care one way or the other in a week? Wait and see about it all.

Dark of the morning. Need only for Starbucks to open to get me to school to start working on the ever deepening stack of papers.