Il y a longtemps; it's been a long time ....

Hello. I'm in Quebec City again. Sorry if anyone was checking here for updates. As it all turned out, the plays went well enough, including my one performance as Frederick in Glover, Vermont at the town hall, though Peter Schumann told me I needed a director.

I wasn't able to stay in New York City as long as I wished, for several reasons, so I wasn't able to thank people who worked so hard on the two plays. I'll put a thank you here.

It looks like Frederick was à propos, no? The capitalist barbarians of whom he spoke did indeed take the gates, and as Frederick thought his father thought, nothing could stop them.

Here in Quebec City I have difficulty with access to the kind of technology a writer needs now. Even so, I'm writing. I don't know if I'll write plays for a while, not unless Mark Dannenhauer wants to be Basho, in which case yes I'll write about Basho. But I'm trying to write stories now, be they true or fiction.

I love this quotation from William Maxwell, seen in a recent New Yorker magazine article about him:

"For me, 'fiction' lies not in whether a thing, the thing I am writing about, actually happened, but in the form of the writing ... a story, which has a shape, a controlled effect, a satisfying conclusion — something that is, or attempts to be, a work of art." William Maxwell

I'm going to start a new blog, this one with essays about the Quebec and Mexican borders and about learning French and Spanish as I've tried to do.

Anyway, thanks again to all: Ralph Pochoda and Gwynn MacDonald, especially, and all the many talented people who did Lucila's Story. I think it was important, your doing it. I know it was, for me, and I hope it was for you, and I really hope it was, if even just a very little, for the world at large.

Courage, now. Courage.