Do you have any writing rituals?

I always sharpen all six of the Blackwing 602s in my pencil holder before I sit down at my desk to start typing. But last year I bought a standing desk, so I don’t sit down to type anymore. Nowadays I sharpen the pencils, crank up the desk (it’s a hand crank, not one of those fancy electric jobs), do two minutes of Ujjayi breathing, then climb down from my writing loft and go back to bed. Where I type on my laptop. (By the way, I used to cat-sit for a kitten named “Laptop,” which was the Best Name.) You have surely seen those photos of Mark Twain writing in bed, and Marcel Proust, too, and Charles Simic says, “When the desire comes over me to write, I have no choice but to remain in a horizontal position.” And he won a Pulitzer! I feel I am not exactly addressing your question.

Describe your favorite writing space in a six-word flash.

The space after the final period.

What’s one phrase or saying you love? How about one you dislike or outright hate?

Why stop at one? I’m unaccountably fond of regionalisms (“he is a idiot”), nonstandard dialect constructions (“people love they dogs”), ESL malapropisms (“go to the hell!”), and silliness and absurdity in general (“apply to the Department of Redundancy department”). Those are wonderful and hilarious to me and sometimes I can crack myself up just by saying them aloud to an empty room. And I still take a puerile delight in creative vulgarity. I know a family that has substituted the word “mouse” for the f-word, so they go about their day exclaiming “Mouse!” and “Mouse this!” and (to express joy or pleasure) “Mouseketeers!” So “mouse” is my current favorite saying…. As for outright hate (and now I must be serious), any political or military phrase designed to avoid responsibility or obfuscate truth, like the notorious “collateral damage” for civilian casualties, or “enhanced interrogation techniques” for torture. These Orwellian phrases and those who employ them deserve our contempt.

Your thoughts on any (or all) of these: Writing in the margins of books? Dog-earring pages? Lending books? Reading in the bathtub?

As a teacher I’m constantly writing in the margins of books. Google “Nabokov teaching copy” and look at the images of his volumes of Ulysses, Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, and especially The Metamorphosis, where he posits that Gregor Samsa is transformed not into a cockroach but rather a particular kind of beetle, which he has sketched in some detail on page 1 above the opening lines. That is the kind of marginalia to which I aspire…. Instead of dog-earring (dogs wear earrings?) I apply Post-It Notes, of whatever color is to hand…. I cannot remember the last time I lent anyone a book. I have far too many books and it’s much more likely that I’d give, not lend…. As for reading in the bathtub, it is something I have done with great pleasure, almost daily, for most of my reading life, and you can read more about that here.

Tell us about one thing you’ve crossed off your bucket list.

The first item on my bucket list was “buy a bucket for this list.” So I bought a bucket at Lowe’s. It’s royal blue with a white logo, it’s a five-gallon bucket, it’s made of BPA-free 70-mil HDPE, which as AI tells us is “High-Density Polyethylene, a common thermoplastic polymer known for its strength, durability, and versatility.” This bucket cost $4.58 but with state and local sales tax the total was $4.90. The lids were sold separately (“find the lid that suits your needs”) but it turned out that having no lid actually suited my needs. I crossed off the first item (“buy a bucket for this list”) and threw the updated list into my new blue bucket.

What are you looking forward to in teaching for Charlotte Lit in the fall?

Well, we are going to have some big fun reading and writing a lot of flash. It is unlikely that any of us will ever make even a piddling amount of money by writing flash, so we have to do it for its own sake, for the utter joy and pleasure of it. And of course fall is the best season. I look forward to that. Mouseketeers!