I'm dog sitting over Thanksgiving week, and writing feels a little clunky here in this space that isn't mine but into which I have nested. We don't have workshop this week either, of course, and everything else is canceled too, so I'm feeling altogether dislocated.
Armed with my kindle, I started a long-overdue reading of Payne's Barefoot to Avalon, a memoir that was recommended to me as a model for my own work long before I knew what a DavidPayne was let alone worked with on my MFA thesis. I wish I had read it sooner; my thesis would have been miles better, but even more than that, this is a great book. No one gets to look away in this memoir of family, least of all Payne himself, and its told with such unflinching consideration that you won't want to look away even as the pieces blow up.