Advice for Writers

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Saturday, February 21, 2026

Mary Mackey on Dorothy Bryant’s Novel Killing Wonder

On some occasions you can tell, not just a book by its cover, but a great deal about the author who wrote that book. No cover does this more brilliantly than the one Dorothy Bryant decided to use for her mystery novel Killing Wonder.

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017)

Composed of a collage of photographs taken in 1981 by photographers Felicia Liu and Jane Sherr and designed by Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, the cover of Dorothy’s novel contains candid images of many of the important women writers of Northern California at the time, who were attending a party Dorothy threw to celebrate the completion of the “final final draft” of Killing Wonder.

Mary Mackey’s key to the front cover of Killing Wonder

I suspect that younger readers looking at that cover today will primarily see faces of writers whom they may have read about, faces that perhaps seem as distant to them as a portrait of George Sand once seemed to the young women of my generation. But I see a circle of friends, colleagues, and sister writers who helped one another, encouraged one another, supported one another, met scores of times in person over the years, and cooperated more than they competed. Those writers were:

Sandy Bouchet, Patricia Bullitt, Kim Chernin, Susan Efros, Susan Griffin, Annie Hersey, Pat Holt, Karen Jacobs, Jessica Mitford (nicknamed “Decca”), Mary Jane Moffat, Diana O’Hehir, Tillie Olsen, Charlotte Painter, Nancy Schimmel, Jennifer Stone, Celeste West, J.J. Wilson, and of course, Dorothy herself.

Mary Mackey’s key to the back cover of Killing Wonder

Dorothy is there with short hair and an ever-ready smile. I’m also there, in a skirt and blouse and huge, lemur-like glasses looking happy to be in the company of other women writers, famous and not famous, published and not published, who really believed that when one of us succeeded all of us succeeded.

Dorothy was an integral part of that community. She lived in it, prospered in it, and was always ready to help women writers who were struggling to get their work published in a literary world that was still primarily dominated by men who often expressed open contempt for women who wrote, sometimes openly stating that women’s poetry was only suited for greeting cards and proclaiming that the only really important novels were robust, masculine, and Hemingwayesque.

It was Dorothy who suggested San Francisco Chronicle Book Review editor Pat Holt review Susan Griffin’s work; Dorothy who introduced me to Alta Gerrey, the founder of Shameless Hussy Press, who published my first novel Immersion when no one in New York knew what to do with a poetic account of a young woman struggling for intellectual, spiritual, personal, and sexual liberation in the jungles of Costa Rica.

Dorothy was not the center of our community. No one was the center. But Dorothy was more conscious than most of us of the importance of this small group of women writers. I think she saw us as we had not yet seen ourselves. She understood that we were like the writers in Paris in the 20s: working together, influencing each other’s writing, demonstrating almost without knowing it that sisterhood was indeed powerful. And so she wrote Killing Wonder, a novel that was in many ways not like us, and yet mirrored us 32 times on its cover.

Mary Mackey became a writer by tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of nine poetry collections and 14 novels, including the New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Saturday, February 14, 2026

Writing for Someone Completely Different from You

Sometimes when I’m writing or revising I try to imagine a reader who has almost nothing in common with me. For example, I’m a middle-class, White, male, educated, senior citizen living in the first half of the 21st century in an urban area in California in the United States, and writing in English. There are cultural and historic references that are self-evident to me and to people like me. For example, I might include in a poem:

Should I stream that flick on Amazon for $5.99
or walk three miles to the only movie theater left in town?

Now, imagine a thirteen-year-old girl reading that line one hundred years from now in a remote village in the mountains of another continent.

Imagine a reader as different from you as possible…

Would she have heard of Amazon? I sure hope not. Even if she reads English, would she know what a “flick” is? Would that girl have a clue whether six 2026 U.S. dollars would be a lot or a little to watch a movie? In a world that almost exclusively uses the metric system, would she know if three miles is a long way or a short way to walk? Will a young person halfway around the world a hundred years from now even know what a movie theater is? I hope so, but I don’t know.

So, what can be gained by thinking of that person completely different from me as the audience? Well, considering that potential reader, I might push myself to go beyond the cultural references of my place and time and social status and think of more universal ways to express myself. What if, for instance, I wrote those lines this way:

Should I stream that film for the price of an ice cream cone
or hike an hour to the only movie theater left in town?

Using “the price of an ice cream cone” instead of $5.99 means that the reference won’t age, and it’s not geographically specific. It’s also clear I’m referring to a relatively small amount of money. Using the time it takes to walk rather than a unit of distance sidesteps the problem of whether miles will still be recognizable outside the USA one hundred years in the future.

As far as the movie theater goes—well, it’s already a disappearing cultural artifact, so maybe that reference should stay as is, since it’s likely going to be even more quaint in one hundred years.

But why is it even important for someone completely different from you, living one hundred years from now, to understand your writing? And will that person ever read my work or yours? Well, if you don’t consider that person who is very different from you when you write or revise, it’s probable that many things in your writing will confuse them, and it’s so much more doubtful that your work will engage them.

Here’s another example:

I took 80 to the second Richmond exit

Anyone who lives near me in the San Francisco Bay Area is going to know this means “I took Highway 80 to the second exit in Richmond, California”. But that girl in the mountains of another continent is not going to know that, never mind 100 years from now. She might think the speaker delivered 80 crumpets to Richmond near London in the United Kingdom. So why not make it easier for her to understand and give her more context? I know that’s not as cool as saying, “I took 80 to the second Richmond exit,” but how important is being cool compared to being comprehended?

I realize there’s another side to this argument. Specific references to the poet’s time and milieu add color and flavor, and those are crucial to good writing. When we read a Shakespeare sonnet, there are many references that we have to research in order to understand it. He ends his Sonnet 126, speaking of Nature:

She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure.
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.

There are references here to an audit and a quietus that have become obscure. I had to do some digging to understand these lines. They basically mean that the beautiful young man Shakespeare addresses in this sonnet may delay the aging process, but Nature will ultimately present a final bill (audit) that must be paid (with a quietus, or money that settles a debt). In other words, time will eventually have its way, even with those who age gracefully.

Does the fact that most of us would have to research this poem to understand it mean that it’s not as good as other Shakespeare sonnets? Well, I’m not sure, but certainly Sonnet 126 is not as popular as many of The Bard’s other poems. The obscurity of the references may have something to do with that.

I tend to err on the side of making myself clear. I know many writers have other priorities. But as Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.”

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Be an American Writer

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Remembering Ted Berrigan

When I was a young poet living in the East Village in New York City in 1976, I took a writing workshop with Ted Berrigan. Ted taught at the legendary Poetry Project at Saint Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, then the center of the New York School of poets. His class was extremely popular. There were 35 to 40 students in the workshop. Ted held forth on various subjects during the class—he was a great raconteur, spinning amazing stories about the writers and artists he’d known over the years.

Poet Ted Berrigan

Ted said many memorable things about poetry to the students. I vividly recall him telling us, “If you really want to know how good a writer you are, all you have to do is look in the mirror.” That seemed like an extremely odd thing to say for several reasons. Not the least of those was that Ted himself was not the most personable human being. He grew long his dark scraggly hair and beard, was overweight, wore his sleeves sloppily rolled-up, and had thick glasses. And yet … he had a distinct appearance unlike anyone else I’ve ever known.

The following year, 1977, I was part of a group of three younger writers who interviewed Ted Berrigan for City magazine. Ted invited us to speak with him in the railroad flat in the tenement where he lived at 101 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. When the three of us conducting the interview arrived, Ted was there with his wife, the poet Alice Notley, and their two children. Toys littered the floor and the paint was peeling off the walls. But the apartment was decorated with stunning artworks by painters Ted was friends with, including Alex Katz, Joe Brainard, and Larry Rivers. Such a contrast!

portrait of Ted Berrigan by Alex Katz

Ted wrote in his poetry about using the drug methedrine, so I should not have been surprised that all we had to do for the interview was turn on the tape recorder, ask a short question, and Ted would talk nonstop for 15 minutes at a time.

He said some unforgettable things in that interview, including his analysis of speed in poetry. Ted categorized poets by whether they were “fast” or “slow” poets. In the “fast” group he included writers like Frank O’Hara. O’Hara was known for quickly jotting down stream-of-consciousness observations and thoughts during busy social interactions, so his poems have a rapid pace built into them. Among the “slow” poets, Ted listed Robert Creeley, a writer who often included short lines and a lot of blank space in his work.

Another memorable moment in the interview was when we asked Ted about his connection to the New York School. He revealed that the label “the New York School” was originally a joke, a goof on the School of Paris. Ted described the New York School in poetry as having no program or spokespersons, unlike, say, the Black Mountain School, where the writer Charles Olson deliberately shaped the aesthetic.

Ted also talked in the interview about the literary criticism then popular in university English departments, with its approach that “any poem could be ‘cracked.’” That was a description Ted quoted from his wife, Alice Notley. Ted went on to categorize that academic idea of a poem as, “If you went at it [a poem] hard enough you could literally take it apart and get it.” He dismissed that methodology as being just “funny,” a scornful attitude very typical of the avant-garde writers in New York City at the time.

City magazine editor Ron Kostar then questioned Ted Berrigan about the structure of his own poems. Ron challenged Ted by saying his poems were made up of fragments. Ted responded by saying that he and the writers he felt closest to got the idea of poems as collages of fragments from writers like Charles Olson and Ezra Pound. He maintained that what he and his literary colleagues were doing with fragments was not that different from the work of more traditional or narrative writers:

… we don’t think of it as fragmented, though it’s certainly made up of fragments … But in the piecing together there’s a definite line that runs through the poem, the same as the kind of line that runs through the most academic of academic poems. It’s just that it’s placed in a different location. It doesn’t run right down the center, but it moves in arabesques…

I love his description of the thread of a poem as moving in an arabesque, but I’m not sure I agree that all avant-garde poems have a thread running through them. Some are just random fragments.

Ted went on to offer a fascinating account of how he personally composed a poem:

… if the kind of poem I’m writing is a poem about an experience [or] … emotion that falls upon me, and I understand something all at once, I like the poem to give that to you. If it’s something that took longer, and was a more complex experience, I like the poem to give you enough to take you into that …

Another moment that stands out in the interview was when Ted said, “There are only half a dozen ways to begin a poem, and half a dozen ways to end a poem. Most poems take place in the middle …” I agree, and I’d even say that there are fewer than half a dozen ways to end a poem. (Please see my blogs on types of closure in poetry.)

I won’t easily forget Ted’s hilarious description of how he completely made up an interview with the composer John Cage. Ted published the interview, thinking that readers would understand that this was a work of fiction. It turned out this was not understood, and astonishingly, Ted’s piece won a prize as the best interview of the year. The judges, who included Susan Sontag and Robert Brustein, were very surprised to learn that Ted had created this made-up interview as a sort of Dadaist act. John Cage, it turned out, was highly amused by the whole incident.

Ted Berrigan died in 1983 at the age of 48, after a life of burning his candle at both ends. Many former students gratefully remember his classes, his humor, and his one-of-a-kind insightful ramblings on the art of poetry.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest: