I got through high school and college without a boyfriend. I had a few dates, but no one you could call a boyfriend. (By boyfriend I mean someone who would actually refer to me as his girlfriend.) So after dating (and I use the term loosely) guys who seemed incapable of anything resembling a actual …
Category: life
High School, Facebook, and Who the Hell Am I Anyway?
Former high school friends find me on facebook. This happens to everyone who ventures onto fb-land. Maybe this makes you happy. Most of the people who "friend" me, are nice people. They never did me any particular harm back in school. In some ways, catching up on their lives is good. But here is the …
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Women Are Awesome. How about if We Stop Murdering Them?
I don't remember when I started to care about women. (And I'm not going to say women's issues because it's not a self-contained status sort of thing. We're half the population----nothing special interest about that.) In grad school I complained about a professor who told the class his favorite bar was called "The Silent Woman" …
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Kill Them All!
I've just killed someone. Well, a fictional someone. A fictional character that I quite liked. She was young. And sympathetic. I wanted her to live, but that seemed...so unlikely. I've killed characters before...this one just bothered me more than usual. Maybe I've watched too much of Stranger than Fiction. Am I killing a character because …
My Narrow View Is Sharp Enough to Stab Him in the Eye
I spend a stupid amount of time worrying if my writing is good enough. But apparently what I needed was a good old-fashioned sexist attack to make me know my writing is a damn well just fine. Have you seen the article about VS Naipaul? NPR picked up the story from The Guardian. And Naipaul …
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Maybe You Should Fret
Maybe I fret too much. Sure. Fret. Sounds like a knot to me. A knot I can't possibly undo. If no one says anything about my stories, I think the stories are bad. Or at least failures. Or boring. Or something generally not nice. If someone says something nice, I think awesome and OMG I'll …
Maybe Not Everywhere
This may be a lame excuse, but I'm in Waco. Waco! And I've got to be at a roller rink tomorrow morning and the next at 5 am. These are the joys of being a mom to a speed skater. I have trouble writing in hotel rooms. I can write in my home, in cafes, …
Maybe! Are you surprised?
Surprise may be something you avoid. Years ago, a friend's husband asked me to get his wife out of the house on the day of her surprise birthday party. "It's your birthday! What do you want to do? My treat!" "I want to see Life is Beautiful." "For your birthday? Won't it be depressing?" "Yes! …
Maybe You Won’t Laugh
I may be joking. Interviewer: In your Antologia Personal... Borges: Look here, I want to say that that book is full of misprints. My eyesight is very dim, and the proofreading had to be done by somebody else. Interviewer: I see, biut those are only minor errors, aren't they? Borges: Yes, I know, but they …
I Think–Maybe
I may be wrong about everything. In The Paris Review Interviews Part I, Saul Bellow quotes E.M. Forster, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" I read this and thought, "Exactly." This is another reason I write. The more I write, the more I work out the world and …
Marta Bacon 