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joewriter.bsky.social
Author of the Might Have Been and stories in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review and Missouri Review, among other work.
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“We are made of breathing and breathing ends. But we are also made of dust, which doesn’t. The air is warm tonight, and barely there, like a memory of being touched. Life isn’t fair — it’s beautiful.” ….from April 30, 2020, in This Costly Season, by John Okrent

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

“…her joy consisted, in the main, of a satisfaction of pure instincts and a deep sense of gratitude to those who made her life what it was.” — George Gissing, The Nether World

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

“Miraculous, how we seem to get the art we need, when we need it.” — James Parker, “Ode to the Right Art at the Right Time,” in GET ME THROUGH THE NEXT FIVE MINUTES

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

"If only we had pity on one another, all the worst things we suffer from in this world would be at an end. It’s because men’s hearts are hard that life is so full of misery. If we could only learn to be kind and gentle and forgiving — never mind anything else." — The Nether World, George Gissing

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

"Emma replied distractedly, looking at his seedy clothes, his shaggy hair, the green cast of his white skin, his deep black eyes, in which all the feelings were disheveled, tattered, and held together only by the merest faith that change had to come.” #SundaySentence

submitted 19 days ago • 0 comments

“Today I’m beginning to think that joy, in the face of everything, is the big secret—that we have a calling, each of us in our own lives, to locate and magnify our hidden or not-so-hidden happiness.”— from James Parker’s “Get Me Through the Next Five Minutes”

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

As another in my attempts to counter madness by celebrating great writing: today on Bloom, “Cantilever” by Terry Price (@storyteller7.bsky.social) bloomsite.wordpress.com/2025/01/28/b...

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

“...praying that you will not lie here in the lone darkness... waiting & dragging through the time. Let me draw the curtains, & light the candles, & make things more comfortable about you. The church-clocks will strike the hours just the same & the night will pass away just the same.” Bleak House

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

In keeping with my plan to fill my life (and feed) with good things: Margot Livesey’s story “The Letter Writer” in the latest issue of Colorado Review is a marvel.

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

This is one of the most telling things T**** has ever said. He was talking about his conversation with Barack Obama at the funeral for Jimmy Carter…”We met backstage, as you know, before we went on.” “Backstage.” “Before we went on.“ At a funeral? In a church?

submitted 50 days ago • 0 comments

In our mad world, I find hope in literature…today two marvelous stories in the new Ploughshares,“Mercy” by Joan Silber and “Ghost” by Charles Baxter. I'm just getting into the rest of it, but I've also found a poem that floored me: “Postmarked from the Middle of Nowhere” by Ansel Elkins.

submitted 50 days ago • 0 comments

“Their need for watching one another should be over now, but they do it all this time, and the stars watch them both through the opened window.”— Bleak House, Charles Dickens (509) #SundaySentence

submitted 54 days ago • 0 comments

This line from Bleak House seems all the more timely on this day, in our present circumstance: “They dies everywheres,” said the boy. “They dies in their lodgings—she knows where, I showed her—and they dies down in Tom-all-Alone’s in heaps. They dies more than they lives, according to what I see.”

submitted 66 days ago • 0 comments

poets.org/poem/christm...

submitted 69 days ago • 0 comments

Today’s poem from Poem-a-Day is breath-taking. poets.org/poem/casualt...

submitted 84 days ago • 0 comments

RIP Marshall Brickman. www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/m...

submitted 89 days ago • 0 comments

“If one reads poetry—ancient and modern—as deeply as Helen did, and stays with it, and lets it roll around in one’s head, the effect is transporting...And nothing of the noisier outer world — not Donald Trump, not Taylor Swift — can get to you.” www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/o...

submitted 97 days ago • 2 comments

poets.org/poem/ars-poe...

submitted 101 days ago • 0 comments

One of my favorite pieces of flash fiction this year is this knockout from Jim Humes in @fracturedlit.bsky.social. fracturedlit.com/diorama-of-s...

submitted 105 days ago • 0 comments

Began rereading BLEAK HOUSE; it’ll take awhile if I keep stopping to sit with single sentences, like this: “Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

submitted 105 days ago • 1 comment

Sometimes when I finish a book, I think with gratitude of Sister Patricia Clare and Sister Annunciata, who taught me to read decades ago. Just said a quiet “thank you” to them after finishing Bernard Malamud’s THE ASSISTANT…a novel I came to the end of with sadness

submitted 440 days ago • 1 comment

Rereading William Trevor’s “Ballroom of Romance.” It breaks my heart every time, for lines like this: “If the weight of circumstances hadn’t intervened she wouldn’t be standing in a wayside ballroom, mourning the marriage of a road-mender she didn’t love.” Stunning from first line to last.

submitted 488 days ago • 0 comments