Not too long ago in the hills of our fatherland, on hill 311 to be exact, there lived a young girl divided into three parts: one part rock candy, one part fervent hope, and one part creative seclusion.

The man in the dog suit whines outside the door.

“Again?” sighs my mother.

“Where’s my gun?” says my dad.

Start at the beginning, which is to say the edge, the perimeter, the shore. That’s where all but the babes of my bedrock start. And even those delivered atop my Mount Sinai like commandments

Half an inch long, an eighth wide, flat as parchment, sharp enough co pierce and pain anyone of mother born, the gray section of wood sac upon an ecclesiastical purple matte between a gold-leafed garland of frame. 

It was 1973, the summer of Watergate, but my mind was not on politics, but literature. While the parade of unreliable narrators told their stories on daytime television to be followed by their nightly commentators

O’Connor’s agent dropped him off at Theodore’s restaurant. At his agent’s insistence he had put on the black beard, his auburn mane was stuffed up into a gray wig of conservative length, and he was

Sometimes PB to my students, Sack to my friends, and always Pete to my family, my name is Peter Burgundy and I worry that death has been my only inspiration to be a better person—that death has had a way of making life understandable. And oh whoa, how I worry that this will be the case till kingdom come—walking through every day to the quiet beat of grief ’s unfinished heart.

Somebody shouldn’t always have to die, right?

I am one of the howlers: those who, when left alone, whine and howl for the return of they know not what. Piped-in music has been known to help, but only if it is Grand Opera, one kind of howling offsets the other. I have known this about myself for years; but it was not until I watched the tiger at the zoo and realized that it was autistic, that its stripes had become bars and its howling days were over, that I began to take people’s decorations more seriously.

Animal contact can alter what Castaneda calls “assemblage points.” Like mother-love. It’s been slobbered over by Hollywood. Andy Hardy goes down on his knees by his mother’s bed. What’s wrong

In April of 1949, William Burroughs was arrested in New Orleans for “a pound of week and a few caps of junk,” as he later wrote. After a stay at Lexington for the cure, he was advised by his lawyer