This is an account of a disastrous sailing trip Dylan James Brock took in June 2011. View Part 1 here 2 Before the captain bought the forty-one foot sailboat in May 2011, it was owned by a hoarder. Lucille crammed every corner of the boat’s two cabins with assorted trinkets that the captain had cleared out over the course of a few days. All he had chosen to keep  of the clutter was a drawer full of brand new, blank baseball caps,...

Dylan James Brock While Sarah Witherspoon was still alive she was a mockingbird with a tin ear. Her attempts to recreate beauty never did justice to what she mimicked. When not insulting her outright, people called her Spoony. She was a plain brunette with thin hair and a thick brow that kept her from being pretty. The most remarkable aspect of her was how hard she tried and failed to be remarkable. Spoony wore different colored sneakers to...

I should write short stories. I keep at this novel ambition while I have yet to produce anything other than pieces of one that please me.  Walk to run to fly. That kind of thing. I haven’t written one in some time. When I did, it was from the perspective of a young black man. I am not joking. It all started when a teacher at grad school, the estimable Colum McCann, gave me one of his savory, lilting maxims. He said something like,...

I am a Midwestern WASP who has spent time on the East Coast. In 1997 my grandfather died of Parkinson’s Disease. These two facts made me feel right at home with the 2001 novel The Corrections. So when I learned Jonathan Franzen would be guest lecturing during a class at my MFA program, I smiled as if being ticked – I couldn’t help but be happy. Imagine my bewilderment, then, when I watched the hazing of Franzen. The man is...

The summer that I started writing seriously I lived in East Lansing, Michigan, taking a job there. It was the year 2000 and people were still paying just about anybody to do just about anything related to the Internet. With no experience or portfolio I walked into a project manager job at a firm that badly needed management. By firm, I mean a guy, some computers, and Applebee’s. My boss and leader had no office, so he held all...

For two nonconsecutive three-month stretches I worked as a reader at the Paris Review. That quarterly prides itself on discovering new writers from piles of unsolicited manuscripts called slush. It was my job to shovel the slush, if you will, at least through the fiction. I wasn’t being paid, but I had the notion that working hard enough might get me a paid position. So I plowed through as much of that sloppy writing as I could. When...

I could have been making this world better instead of wallowing in the bullshit that is the solipsistic rants of an upper-middle class white Anglo-Saxon protestant doctor’s son. This day I want to end my writing. I want to take every manuscript I have ever written, feed them through a shredder, get drunk, and throw the strips around as if they were confetti. I care nothing for anything kind anyone can say about anything I have ever...

When I left New York City, just about five years ago, I believed I was doing the right thing for my art. Over and over I insisted that it is better to be a full-time artist in the middle of nowhere than a part-time artist in the center of the universe. This theory has panned out to the extent that I have been more productive since moving back to Muskegon, Michigan than in all the previous years of my work combined. Unfortunately, that...

My graduate adviser told me I was better at writing sex scenes than any writer he had ever met. Considering the quantity and quality of the writers this award-winner knows, I took that straight to my head. The irony is that I have had comparatively little sex in my life. There was only one two month period, my brief engagement, when it was readily available. That relationship ended with her abusing me. Then I got the clap after my first and...

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...