Fiction to look forward to

My first stab at blogging came in the year leading up to my 30th birthday. Determined to publish something by the time I turned 30, I launched disciplineandpublish.com, a site for daily writing. The term blog didn't have the ubiquity it suffers from today, but I felt D&P really wasn't one - "this isn't going to be one of those Web diaries" is how I think I phrased it in an initial posting. The idea, modeled after the Daily Themes course in daily writing I took at Yale with Wayne Koestenbaum, was to write every day. It could be fiction, poetry, essay, diary, mock news - anything, as long as it was at least 300 words. It was a good exercise and out of 366 postings there were ten or so I wound up liking. I've posted them here.

Back then it wasn't so terribly competitive to get an audience if you wrote and posted something on a daily basis, and one of the very nicest things about D&P was the people I met doing it. One D&P reader was Cooley Windsor, who was at the time a writing resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. He invited me to read there with him, and so D&P had its closing ceremonies, on my 30th birthday, in that august and splendid setting.

Cooley's short story collection Visit Me in California, coming out in August, just got this review in Publishers Weekly (emphasis added):

Visit Me in California: Stories
Cooley Windsor. Northwestern Univ./Triquarterly, $16.95 (130p) ISBN 978-0-8101-2496-7

San Francisco poet Windsor's punchy, edgy briefs find his characters often caught in Homeric and Old Testament entanglements. “The Last Israelite in the Sea” imagines a protagonist running after Moses after the Red Sea miraculously parts, feeling rapturous but also terrified, barefoot and unable to swim, that he won't make it to shore. “The Art of War” finds various Homeric characters in painfully human situations, such as Paris, steeped in pornography as a youth and unable to consummate his desire for Helen because her beauty only underscores his imperfections, or Achilles, accidentally shot by a farm boy in the chest rather than in the heel. Some selections have a poignant memoiristic feel, as in the elegiac “I'll Be You,” in which the friend of a dying gay man in San Francisco has to make choice that places him between his friend and his friend's caring Tulsa mother. Windsor's stories possess the startling, memorable quality of the brightest fiction. (Aug.)