I have resigned.  This is my last essay for this book review.  Let me make this clear from the outset: I speak for myself, not for the union.  I stand alone.

Which is how it should be.

In last month's issue I ran a column by Eric Miles Williamson.  I ran it alongside a bunch of other great work and then went back to living my life.  A few weeks later I received a frantic email from the Industrial Worker's editor, Diane Krauthamer, that told me to remove Eric's column because "people are getting up in arms about this article."

I thought: Great.

It's high…

My cousin found a hand-grenade in a Camp Robinson stock pond that summer, pulled the pin and tossed it at me. Die, fucker, he said, then took off horseback in a cloud of Arkansas dust. The thing thudded at my feet where I froze, just shut my eyes and waited. That's how it was that summer, dry, no rain since springtime when Grandfather Harvell's Magnolias had bloomed like big white hands and Mama and Daddy had started burning each others clothes in the backyard trash drum. I got sent to live with Uncle Earl, her crazy brother who ran Diamond T Stables, weekend trail rides for a $100…

Like most people, I do not answer the telephone when it rings at suppertime, but I sometimes check the caller ID so that I know the name of whomever I am cussing out. About a year ago when the phone rang around 7 PM, I had already launched into a stream of foul epithets when I saw the name that shut me up: Harry Crews.

I had heard much about Crews since moving to Florida in 1988, but I did not read any of his work until about eight years ago, the same time that I started writing my first novel. I was well steeped in the Southern literary tradition of Faulkner, O'Connor, Warren, Welty,…

Once I had a sorrow/ Long as a rainbow/ Crooked as an elbow/ Deep as a wish/ Wide as a dish.

I don’t believe in beginnings.  I believe in the long middle.  Once upon a time?  Storyteller’s trick.   Sweet invention. 

Once upon a time, a novelist asked me to do a podcast about writing.  Pick a topic, he said.  Because of longstanding interest and no practical experience, I chose songwriting and found a local musician/songwriter who agreed to talk to me about poem and song, about page and stage.  The novelist’s request was a catalyst, an accelerant,…

Works Cited:
     Flaubert, Gustave.Madame Bovary.  Translated by Mildred Marmur. Penguin Books. New York, New York; 1964.
     Cavafy, C.P. The Complete Poems of Cavafy.  Translated by Rae Dalven. Harcourt. New York, New York; 1989.      

I was twenty-two. I was going to write. It was as simple as that. I had decided and so it was going to be. Along with two friends, I packed my bags, left my hometown behind and drove across the country to Boulder to begin a new life.

I…

Works Cited:
     Smith, Abraham. "Hank." Action Books: Notre Dame, Indiana. 2010
     Ortiz, Simon J. "From Sand Creek." Thunder's Mouth Press: Oak Park, New York. 1981.
     Williams, Hank. Audio Recording: "The Ultimate Collection." Mercury Records: Nashville, Tennessee. 2002.
     O'Connor, Frank. "The Lonely Voice." Melville House: New York, New York. 2004.

Backstage in Cleveland's Agora, I shared…

In March 2011 Maine's newly elected Republican governor, Paul LePage, made an executive decision to remove a large commissioned mural from the lobby of the state's Department of Labor. The mural's subject was the history of Maine's working class: it depicted loggers, shoemakers, ironworkers, women riveters working during World War II, a papermill strike, child laborers before reform laws were passed. It was a record of simple historical fact.

Why did the governor want to rid himself of this mural? In the words of a scathing editorial in the New York Times, "his office cited some…

Beirut has as many bookstores as it does bullet holes in its concrete walls. There's an old saying around the Middle East that goes, "The Egyptians write, the Lebanese publish and the Iraqis read." Knowing this and seeing all of those bookstores scattered around the city, I knew my time in Beirut was also a time to stock up.

I went to Beirut under a variety of guises: journalist wanting to see how people live, photographer wanting to capture a city molded from French and Arab influences and as a pilgrim venturing into the Northern Lebanese mountains to visit Khalil Gibran's grave. The…

From the collection Jesus in the Mist, University of South Carolina Press, 2007

I grew up hating crows. I can't explain it for sure, but anytime I saw those glossy black bastards, my blood picked up temperature and speed and I hurried home to get a rifle or shotgun and nail as many as I could before they got out of range. For a fact, if one settled anywhere on my father's property, small as it was, he was asking for a killing, usually a single .22 shot through the head.

Maybe it was the fact that my folks were always filling me with notions that crows were agents of the Devil and were sent to earth to torment decent people who had a hard enough time getting along…

As any writer who is on the road a lot will tell you, that road can get long and tedious and lonely, and sometimes it's all you can do to keep your mind on the things that matter: your woman back home, your dogs, your tractor, the 1500 miles of concrete and asphalt that lie between you and Willis, Texas.

I have finally come to the point in my life where I can handle most misery that comes my way: pain, loneliness, loss, disappointment. You know, all the shit that keeps you from being as happy as you figure by that stage of your life you ought to be. I can usually shake it off after a…

This essay is part of a collection of reviews and essays of the last decade called Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, due out in November from Texas Review Press/Texas A&M University Press Consortium.

When one casts one’s eye over the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction, the standouts are usually written by middle-class people about people like themselves meant to be read by people like themselves. This was the territory James, Wharton, Cather, Proust, Forster, Woolf, Joyce, Waugh, Nabokov, Greene, Cheever, Updike, Rushdie et al. felt most comfortable charting. One thinks of Lawrence, Dreiser, Lewis, Steinbeck, Farrell, and Wright, to name a few, who might be said to have addressed working-class characters, but there is a separate question of the intended readership. Moreover, the writer…

This essay was written in early 2004. The author's books are Against the Workshop: Provocations, Polemics, Controversies, Anatolia and Other Stories, The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, and My Tranquil War and Other Poems.

The current war on terror has been presented as rooted in the objective realities of the U.S. geostrategic position. In fact, catastrophic terrorism, despite the anomalous events of September 11, remains mostly a myth. Its true function is to present a rationale for postmodern governance, under conditions of severe inequality and erosion of the rule of law. The myth of terror permits government to achieve historic reorganization, such as happened at the instigation of the cold war. Parallels are evident between the formation of the national security state in the 1945-1949…

Philip Levine is our eighteenth national poet laureate.  Philip Levine is an old union man and a shit kicking anarchist poet.  He's almost ninety years old and hasn't worked in a factory since 1953.  Maybe earlier.  His more recent poetry, while still concerned with the man on the factory floor, and the decay of his Detroit, lacks the hard burning of his early years.  But so did Whitman's poetry and for good reason.  Few writers are still as angry, as hard, in their eighties as they were in their thirties.  It is a difference in view points: the older man looking back on the years, the whiskey,…