If you work in the nonprofit universe, then you know: late summer/early fall is deadline season, and it usually keeps on rolling into the New Year. Requests for proposals abound. The competition for money is hot: reports are due, it’s the season of giving (Giving Tuesday anyone?), there’s probably a board meeting thrown in there for good measure and likely an event or two… Since this is the work I do, you can imagine that I have been very, very busy. Thus, it has been a minute since I said anything at all here, and while I am sure I have a lot to say about all the nonprofit work bottlenecking relentlessly into the last quarter of every year, I will not digress from the task at hand: Shouting out my incredibly talented writer/creator friends, because you must read all their books.
In my 20s, whenever I was reading a book, I made it a point to simultaneously read the author’s biography (or autobiography) if they had one. The biographies would give me added insight into their books, and I especially enjoyed learning about their contemporaries—those other creators and thinkers who were their friends and acquaintances when they were alive. Frank O’Hara, for example, had connections with Edward Gorey, John Ashbery, Amiri Baraka, Joan Mitchell—musicians, painters, dancers, poets—and so many others. All those influences and relationships came out in, and enhanced, his work. This is the same, I think, for all creators. We are in constant conversation with the books we read and the people we talk to. And back then, when I was a fledlging poet writing very bad poems in coffee shops all around the San Francisco Bay Area, I would think to myself: I wonder if one day I will have a circle of incredibly talented friends who are all creating—our work speaking to each others’ work...
Well, flash forward 30 years, and I do! And what’s so amazing is the range of work—from nonfiction to memoir to poetry to comics. I want to share their work with you (in no particular order, other than when their books finally arrived in the mail!) because everybody needs some reading recommendations every once in a while that are NOT from some algorithm-group-mentality-AI bot. Variety is the spice of life, after all.
Funny, writing this I realize what a key roll Mills College played in these relationships. Too bad they sold themselves to Northeastern. :(