Thirty years ago, in the spring of 1985, I had the great fortune to find myself in Paul West’s English 412 class: Advanced Fiction Writing. I think it was likely one of the last times he taught undergraduate fiction at Penn State. Sadly, Paul experienced health problems that knocked him out of commission for the…
The following is a draft excerpt from my novel in progress, Housebreaking the Muse. The novel is haunted by the character of Jacques Rigaut, the French dadaist, gigolo, drug addict, dandy, and suicide. This fragment is from one of a number of first-person passages that present Rigaut on the night of his suicide. Rigaut Failure…
For most of my adult life, and a lot of my youth, I've been a night owl. As a kid, I loved staying up on Friday and Saturday nights to catch Chiller Theater or The Ghoul. Then came "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert" and "Midnight Special" and "Saturday Night Live." Later, my punk rock inclination and…
At long last I’m returning to the blog after a summer (and then some) of, well, screwing around. In this post, I expand on some remarks I made in answer to a column in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “M.F.A. Fever.” The column takes up the challenges of advising students who seem to have…
I'm still on my summer hiatus for a few more weeks, but wanted to follow up on an earlier post about why I've abandoned writing on a computer and returned to the typewriter. In that post, I noted the word processing program on your computer is itself an impediment to productivity. How so? Ease of…
Ed Desautels' Maximum Fiction 