April 28, 2018

Agonizing cramp last night, the huge muscle along the back of the thigh, pain literally unbearable, though one bears it because there is no exit. Anger jostling with agony. You hobble to the kitchen, screaming. You drink it out. God earns his curses as well as his blessings.

Brilliant stainless spring. Had plans which I changed upon seeing the azure air. Dug plots. Planted annuals. Noted that last year’s voluptuous sowing of forget-me-nots bore fruit, and there are almost enough to cover the waste places outside the fence. Talked with my limping neighbor John, who has had at least three of his joints replaced recently. I want to die with all original equipment if I can.

Went to High 5 for coffee, where Act III of Invisible Husbands was handed to me. Blessed a mother and her daughter who were playing “I Spy” and excitedly planning for next year’s entry into first grade. Blessed an ancient couple smiling and going through the line as if visiting a neighborhood café were a pleasure they had neglected for many years, their calm old faces smiling & smiling.

Off in an hour to sing at a brewery. My voice is 85% restored. My knee aches only late at night. Learn to count these things as blessings.

April 27, 2018

Rehearsal less irksome than the week before. B appeared, which I thought was both brave and regrettable. Focused on the good he intends, he doesn’t realize the damage he does.  Still passive-aggressively correcting others, as though no lessons were learned by being epicly wrong.

Joy in feeling my body respond to the new regime. I can’t understand, actually, why it should be working so well.

April 26, 2018

From the North Carolina Literary Review: 

I am pleased to report that final judge Stephanie Powell Watts has selected your story "Corin and Dorinda" for second place in the 2018 Doris Betts Fiction Prize. With your permission, NCLR would like to publish your story in NCLR Online 2019, due out in January. If that is amenable to you, please sign and return the attached publication agreement form. 

We ask you to keep this news of your 2nd place and pending publication confidential until the North Carolina Writers' Network posts the press release, around May 1. We will notify you when the news is public. 

Congratulations! 
Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

“Second Place,” he sighed. It is kind of a peculiar story, so I should be satisfied with that.

Yard Fathers completed my fence while I was gone, and I went this rainy AM and, nevertheless, planted the mulberry Jesse Israel had kept for me, and three roses, and devil’s pokers, and cyclamen for the autumn.  Finished in time for the chill and blessed rain to fallen in torrents upon them all.

Bill Cosby is convicted of rape. Let no man count himself as fortunate until he is in the grave.

April 25, 2018

The Yard Fathers have been working on my new fence for two blustery, bitter wintery days, and so far as I can tell, have completed it. It’s clean and handsome. It’s shorter than the previous one; I will not be protected from the scrutiny of my neighbors on the hill, though I will be from that of people on the street. I liked having three fit young men pass up and down through my yard. I liked their lively little dog, Hank, friendly and curious and aching at each moment for contact and adventure. The yard is a gouged and muddy mess. The cartons of plants which have been piling up on the porch may now be settled. Jesse Israel phoned to say they have a mulberry for me.

During office hours yesterday, G came and talked to me for a long time about art, poetry, and his future. After Irish class, C talked to me a long time about music, art, and his future. In each case I ached with anxiety to say the right thing, hear the thing that was actually meant, to be helpful and understanding and able to aid these young men in steering the right course. I smiled the whole time. I hope they didn’t think I was taking their tribulations lightly; I was merely taking pleasure in their company.

April 24, 2018

Today has been health evaluation day. Over the last few days, sensing myself on the brink of collapse, I’ve tried to change my life. The doctors are not precisely helpful, but useful diagnoses can be cobbled together from bits and pieces that fall out of their mouths. I have decided this: my exhaustion, anemia, itchy skin, excess of phlegm, and dehydration are the result of the drugs which I’ve been taking to calm muscular inflammation. They have damaged my kidneys, throwing my body into crisis mode where it is always trying to make more blood. I stopped all drugs for inflammation and replaced them with cbd oil. It has worked. In three days the muscle cramps have ceased, and for the first time in six months I can talk and sing without elaborate hydration. The pain from arthritis lingers–softened–but the burning sweater of inflammation that used to grip my shoulders is gone. Tylenol remains to me, and I’ll try that on the arthritis tonight.

April 23, 2018

Shakespeare.

I have a deeper voice than most of the guys You Tube puts forward as “the deepest voice in the world.” Some of those Russians beat me. Im what they’re calling an oktavist. I think this is underappreciated.

April 22, 2018

Deep night. Listening to the best rendition of “Summertime”: that of Mahalia Jackson.

A rabbi preached this morning, rather gloriously. DJ and I agreed that he was hot.

Exhausted sleep, four hours after brunch after church. I think I was excising some deep sickness. Woke reborn.

April 21, 2018

Those inexplicable spirits that move the hearts of men have bread rising in the oven downstairs. I rose determined just to buy something for the department pot luck, but before I knew it was elbow deep in flour. The lawn outside the kitchen windows is dramatic with the lights and darks of dawn.

Sam and I went to the Magnetic last night to see B’s take on Ibsen’s The Doll’s House. It was exactly and only that, point by point, “updated” to 1962, I think, and the tarantella changed to a mambo. I think Nora is given more time to explain at the end than she was by Ibsen, but that is a flaw. It was a well-made play because Ibsen made it. After the first five minutes I wondered why B had thought she should do it and why the Magnetic thought they should produce it. Sam, who didn’t know the original, was intrigued by it, though questioned whether the relationship between male and female in the household rang true even in 1962. Too much in the “modernization” simply didn’t work. Why not just put on Ibsen’s play if you want to make those points? I congratulated her heartily. Cocktails afterwards at Vivian’s.

Department party at Anne’s. I survived. Came home and took down the vine trellis ahead of the replacement of the fence.

April 20, 2018

Cool morning. Have not yet started my day. Rehearsal was interesting last night. I resigned from the small ensemble, partially because of precarious energy, partially because B still refuses to speak to me, and as we’re side by side in the same section, it’s simply not workable. What a monstrous baby he is. I refrained from beginning one short solo which I knew was mine, knowing that he would move right in and take it, and be chastized. “That’s David’s solo,” Simone said. It gave me stupid satisfaction.

After a flurry of emails, I am assured that the most offensive part of the commission-- “Lonely Tenor”-- will not be sung, and the ludicrous spoken word part has been deleted. Victory incomplete but decisive. It’s still possible that indignation will be so great on the other side that the piece will be withdrawn, or W and B may resign. Then, nothing but trumpets. But for now, enough. Sadness comes off my heart like a winter blanket.

April 19, 2018

Joy in having gotten through church choir with voice intact. My earliest peony is a cloud of white bloom. The window guy comes today, so I spent part of the morning clearing away the surprising volume of nicknacks with which the sills were encumbered.

PM: The window washers–who had set their own time for arrival last week, around which I planned my day– got “caught up in something” and “had some fires to put out”– meaning they came hours late and are still working downstairs. Actually, the inside man is on the phone and the outside boy, as I watched through the kitchen doors, was also on the phone, washing with one hand. He asked if they could come back tomorrow, and I confessed that was the only thing that would be worse. Finally, it all looks fine, though one of the windows will not close now, and I had to stuff the gap with T-shirts.

April 18, 2018

Tangle of days and events, happening at exactly the moment when my anemia was reaching crisis, so everything lies under–mercifully– a wash of half-consciousness.  On that front, the stand-in doctor ordered the same tests Melissa ordered in the past, but he said something as he was walking out the door that may be the key to everything. I had been taking a variety of aspirins for the inflammation in my shoulders, and the ones I favored all cause bleeding from the stomach. Tylenol now stands alone–which I had avoided for some reason having to do, I think, with the unloveliness of the name. Also, S L sells me marijuana, so stomach-coddling relief may now be arriving from all sides.

The senior readings Sunday were outstanding–quite the best that they have ever been, the credit going absolutely to the quality and inventiveness of the students. Ethan memorized his piece and moved around the room delivering it. It was electrifying.  Moving the furniture for that event, though, exhausted me so that I was neutralized for two days– went to class, met expectation, but in a mist of exhaustion. Only then did I go to the doctor. Fell asleep in the waiting room.

New round of protests against Brothers, Lovers, and Friends, the mess with which we are saddled by B’s malfeasance. My argument is that we are not saddled with it at all, and may simply not perform it. The usual response to that is, “But we have spent so much money already.” Perhaps we have. Perhaps we should not debase our souls simply we emptied our pockets. One resents the energy that goes into matters like this, but not expending the energy insures victory for the Darkness.

Q has pulled out of Antigonus and withdrawn from all is classes, which he was failing. This may set onto an even keel one of the two or three most over-confident people I know. I do note that he has the distinction of annihilating TWO of my plays in the course of four months. One forgives youth everything. Well, most things. Certainly this. I find myself not actually caring very much.

Monday night snow fell, and the temperatures dipped below freezing. Not one of my plants seemed to have been damaged. That blessing balances all.

April 13, 2018

Blazing bright spring day, the sky a flawless eggshell azure. I think I planned something else, but what I actually did was buy many bags of rich dirt and haul out to Reems Creek and buy a serviceberry and a Norway spruce. I drove my truck onto the back lawn, for the trees were too heavy to carry very far. Planted them. By the time I got to the spruce, I was so tired I had to sit in the shade and rest after every few shovelfuls. The spruce went into the tangle of English ivy that used to be the shade of the pine, and every spadeful was a tangle of ropey root. The most striking blossom now are the volunteer magenta wild phlox, and after them the volunteer buttercups. Napped. Fought savage leg cramps. It is still full light.

April 12, 2018

Finished the practice readings for my seniors. They’re all good, but they’re too many, and the audience will be begging for mercy before the end. In fact, they are NOT all good, and my problem child came late to class, red badly, spent most of her time making excuses, and had us drop pennies in a pitcher as though it were a wishing well. I don’t know why. She kept me afterward to plead her case that she stayed up all night with anxiety and she shouldn’t have to fulfill the requirements along with the other students.  She has never stayed for a full class, never brought work for me to see, blames Attention Deficit Disorder, and adds that she’s off her meds. I don’t doubt her, but I wonder why she thinks that is an excuse. Our students were taught somewhere that if something is inconvenient, they need not worry about doing it; they will be “accommodated” and passed along toward an unearned success. “I know I didn’t complete the requirements, but I really need that degree–“ I will probably pass her whether she reads or not, for she has been 15 years trying to get a degree, and mercy in me is stronger than justice. I’m not proud of that.

Croaked my way through rehearsal. The “final” version of the commission was rolled out, and it is, if anything, worse than what one imagined. W used his exclusive access to the librettist to falsify Cantaria history, sniping and backbiting through the text as he does through a rehearsal. The balance of the music is a duet for tenor and baritone–W and B– about their lives, having nothing to do with Cantaria or the people who actually paid for the music. The rest of us are reduced, literally, to the chorus in their love story. It is the worse case of malfeasance I have seen up close, and the perpetrators do not seem the least bit ashamed, either to have done it or to have been caught doing it. All people not themselves have always been pawns in their lives. I imagine they wonder what all the fuss is about.

Ended the day stuffing cheesecake into my mouth.

April 11, 2018

Grasping the middle of the week like a shipwrecked man with his fingers around a floating board.

Picked up my taxes. Turned out to owe the State of New York a little for what they supposed was a profit on The Great Comet. Got an estimate for the washing of windows.

Hemoglobin crisis continuing: is it getting worse? Can hardly walk from the front door to the car. Could hardly sing last Thursday.

April 10, 2018

The house across the street is being re-roofed, and the roofers play a radio station loud enough to be heard over the hammering, which means that I can hear it too, and a perpetual pleading, narrow, salesman voice pervades the spring air. Disturbing, especially because you can hear the tone but not always the content. The tree peonies impend upon their thick stalks.

April 9, 2018


Typical gray and leisurely Monday. Worked on Sam-sam.

April 8, 2018

Covered new plantings last night against temperatures rumored to drop to the 20's.

Attended a rehearsal of Antigonus in the UNCA theater rehearsal space. Q is an excellent director, perceptive and patient beyond his years. His actors were another story. He was like a lightning bolt darting into a bank of dark and unformed clouds, all of his actors meaty and sleepy and resistant and grumbling, as actors do, about something.  I remember why I turned from the theater in school, though part of my heart was there. The best of the actors is also quite beautiful. Things are never fair, never equal. He came late, and I gathered he had no reason to, other than to establish himself as “he who comes late.”They play interesting theater games, but the enthusiasm thus generated  doesn’t seem to bleed over into the work. When they were actually saying my lines, it was electrifying.

Mention of Shakespeare sends these actors into howls of derision, as if they had discovered some great fraud that fooled the rest of history. Are they taught that by the Drama department? It is almost an article of faith that contemporary practice is better than Shakespeare’s by reason of. . . well, I have not heard the reason, merely the brave declaration.

Found Minos the turtle dead beside the pond. Maybe the bears had dug him out of hibernation, but they hadn’t eaten him. I was sad, but I also learned that he had dwelt stealthily in my pond since I put him there, boding well for future reptile plantations.

April 7, 2018

The bears suddenly occupy part of my mind that’s usually reserved for family. I worry about how and where she finds food for herself and her baby. In last night’s bitter rain, I wondered if they had any sort of shelter.

My show at Mars Hill has been rescheduled for November. My show at the Flood closes today, but also I receive news that the gallery has moved or is moving immediately. . . somewhere else. Making frantic arrangements to pick up my work, which I can’t do in the rain . . . .

I am a granduncle, Beka’s daughter, whose name is Clara Joy

Met Scott again in the locker room, discovering that he fly fishes for a living, leading fishing expeditions for a local sports shop. We discussed the good fortune of doing pretty much what you wanted to do your whole life. 

April 6, 2018

Strange dreams, the kind that hold on until you’re more than half awake. Read as part of Queer Fest, me and four lesbians. They presented coming-out stories. I did not. I presented Uzziah and Tecumseh on the mountain. Coming-out stores are, now, pre-literature, something you get out of the way before you write the story.

Tony mowed the lawn and didn’t see the bears.

April 5, 2018

Was buying seeds and bulbs when I got a message from the cleaning lady that a mama bear and her cub were in my back yard. “Great,” I thought. She sent a photo of them beside the pond. I got home and was digging a bed for the rhubarb when I saw them, or heard them at first, emerging from behind the tool shed. The mother is very, very big, and the baby very, very tiny, and they look comical together, the baby clearly setting the agenda with a squeal or a dash to one side or the other. She seems to be an excellent mother. I resolved not to be driven out of my own yard, and continued setting the rhubarb while she watched me from the fence. She pulled out the pond pump filter looking for fish, I suppose, or maybe just out of curiosity. The baby practiced climbing on my magnolia tree. I sat on my front porch and watched a mama bear playing with her baby in my front yard. Posted all this on Facebook and received a flood of advice, ranging from call Animal Control right now to please do not call Animal Control ever. Good hiding places around here, but I wouldn’t think there’d be anything to eat, so maybe they’ll move on. As for destruction, they can’t be worse than a couple of teenagers. We’ll see how it all looks in the morning light, now about an hour off.

Terrible rehearsal last night, frantic and loud and strained and I literally voiceless before the end of it. In that respect, I’m not having a good time. But then, there are the bears. . . .

April 4, 2018

Google reveals that The Falls of the Wyona won Honorable Mention in the Children’s Division of the 2016 Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Did I know about this? Did they READ the thing, that they considered it a children’s book?

Fairly good day at the studio, though the god of mess presided, and everything I touched turned to smear.

Made soup out of the dead-nettles in my peony bed.

April 3, 2018

Stepped out onto the porch and saw the shape of a rabbit making its way through the dark. At the same instant I became aware of the most melodious and loud disharmony of morning birds. It was paradise.

A little research reveals that I am now the senior faculty member at UNCA. It’s a little grand, a little horrifying.

Dull reading after a good class. Wiley praises Night, Sleep, calling it a love letter to the region.

April 2, 2018

Twittering of birds through the one open window. Holy Week was meaningful this year as it has not been in a long while. The demon vanished like smoke. Sitting in the dark on Holy Saturday I had a vision of myself as a vast pavilion through which the moon passed in all its phases, led by one golden and full. The Sunday services were barely endurable, because of exhaustion, but endured they were, and we are delivered to a new morning. Easter brunch with DJ at Avenue M.