susanstinson | Last week's reading

Everyone who read was very good. Love that. Jonathan Harper, the editor from Lambda Book Report who had organized the event, was sweet and gracious and had clearly worked both effectively and very hard.

Sarah Schulman told me that my friend Alison had given my book to her, put it right into her hands when they were both at a writers colony. That is such a concrete, electric kind of gift for me. Sarah, who was sitting behind me, touched my shoulders when I finished reading, told me it was good. This was a small, beautiful thing, and a comfort.

I think that Mark Wunderlich does amazing stuff in his poetry with assumptions about rural life, human beings' animal natures, passion and power, and he does it with this incredible technical control.

Colm Toibin, whose most recent book I had been reading with such pleasure on the train, read a scene in which Henry James and a gondolier go out into the water in Venice to try to submerge a dead friend's clothes, a woman, as a kind of burial at sea. The big skirts do not sink easily. One piece, in particular, goes under then rises stubbornly until the gondolier holds it under with his oar. There was so much about grief in this.