I began college a year early, having skipped sixth grade, but that never dissuaded me from believing I could tell the world how to act. So when a new friend asked me to direct his then unfinished play, I agreed to do so enthusiastically. It began on a drunken night at freshman orientation. My roommate there turned out to be a boozer and a playwright. When he and I were both wasted his play sounded good, and I thought I could direct it...

Sing of songs, my muse, as if I might yet meet you and you might yet love me and we might make the art I cannot alone. I feel your purpose move through me, but its ends and means are proving to be a problem. My fantasy world is weighing on my shoulders, and I want to reshape it according to my will, but I cannot put it down to do so. So I make plans for the day that I am no longer Atlas. The best of what I do is deliberate. This applies to...

There are periods of time that are supposed to change your whole life that invariably do, such as Freshman year at college or your wedding. One particular period changed me more than any other. It made me remake myself as a musician and songwriter. It made me realize that writing songs on demand is perhaps a rarer gift than writing most other things. I was poet when I got there and a troubador when I left. This had something to do with...

There was a while in the winter of 2002 – 2003 when I seemed to be unable to write at all. It didn’t help the for forty days straight of temperatures below twenty degrees Fahrenheit. I never wanted to leave the old house for class, and got far behind in my work. What writing I did produce was nowhere near the quality that I had achieved the preceding fall. The material felt even weaker than the work I had done on my earliest...

The whole of history can be summed up as attempts to impress women with varying degrees of success. Along these lines, I have made more headway as a would-be writer than as a would-be rocker. This never made sense to me. Weren’t women supposed to go home with the star of the stage while the novelist wept onto the freshly spat letters from his inkjet? A few entertaining generalizations that make for better copy than the truth occur to me....

When I was seventeen I began to write in earnest, finishing a play and a screenplay. I would drink coffee and hard liquor in succession while writing. First I drank liquor until I got a bit woozy, and then I drank coffee until I got a bit jittery, and so went the spin cycle. In this way I managed to get those few brief projects done. Still, I could not sustain a novel, which is where I saw myself being the most content. I have always wanted...

When composing this post, I found myself fumbling with different ideas, their angles poking into soft flesh as I turned them over and over. I would get a few sentences into my rant and then stop and erase its entirety. This, I believe, is because I must at this point share something rather stigmatized in our age. I have schizo-affective disorder, and am told that I have all the symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I have...

Streaming consciousness into language can be like recollecting the plot of a dream. Details are filled in. Feelings cannot be explained. The actual experience in all its glory of being a human being does not transmit. When I write in stream of consciousness, I quiet myself enough to hear the inner monologue, and then follow the thoughts. I am not a writer. I am a stenographer of background noise. When it is all done, I often have piles upon...

There are several divergences in my life where I made the decision to be an artist rather than any number of things. By artist I mean that I make different sorts of art, though a facility with words seems to be the blessing I use most. One choice where the whole world became a transistor and there were only two ways to go happened when I applied to the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. I sat in the August heat – I applied almost...

I remember the first time I sat down to write a novel. I was twelve. I cranked out the first few dozen pages and then stopped. Not much has changed since then. I still start novels. Most of the time I get five or ten thousand words into them and stop. I am sometimes told I should write short stories for this reason. The problem is that all my ideas are expansive. I don’t want to shrink a piece meant to be large down until it...