Let me start here: I expect you to disagree with me. I expect you to argue.

I also expect that there are those out there who are rolling their eyes, thinking that I should be talking about books, not television. But the thing is, when television is done well, I love it, and television has done mystery, crime, suspense, and spy thrillers well, especially well in the last ten years.…

            My friend Scott once said that bad poets get into language poetry so they can just write the word “duck” on a piece of paper ten times and be done with it.

            I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but it feels like it.

            By way of explaining, language poetry is a movement that started with poets like Gertrude Stein and took off in the 1970s and emphasizes the way words work together instead of…

I had just finished giving a reading in Long Beach a couple of months ago and was standing a little apart from everyone. It was a hot room, and I’d been wearing a suit and speaking for a long hour, and I think people were giving me a comfortable distance because I am a sweater in the best of times. In the worst, I’m a stick of butter on a hot day.

“So you work at Mt. SAC?” someone said behind me.

I turned to find a close…

            Despite the fact that I post on blogs, I’m kind of a Luddite, but I have to say I love what technology is doing for our local writing communities.

            It used to be that if someone without a lot of money put out a small magazine, the result they would have terrible production (which was kind of charming) and not a lot of people would know about them. I loved small magazines. It was fun to be one of the few people who read The Chiron Review or The Small…