I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

The days are stacked against what we think we are.

The fact is, the media never gets off the interstate unless there's a major explosion.

I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.

Strangely, when I totally emerged from this slump I couldn't comprehend how I had almost drowned it it.