the cowboy priest

"Francis Xavier Sullivan left St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers after two years of prayer and study to become a police officer, leaving his mother in tears, her express-lane to heaven now blocked, his father elated, and his uncle Tim Cooney, a New York City cop, proud. When he was a boy, Francis told anyone who asked that he wanted to be a cowboy priest when he grew up, riding the range in his Roman collar on his palomino, Archangel, bringing the sacraments to cowpokes and buckaroos around the campfires and bunkhouses." 

Francis X. is a minor character in a novel I'm writing. Today I found out he could have joined the Cowboy Church Network had he followed his dreams.

reunion

Just back from a three-day party in Fayetteville, Arkansas. We were gathered to celebrate with our mentor, Bill Harrison. Much drinking and much storytelling. A test of stamina for some of us.  

writers on writers

For Esme With Venom and Snark. Writers not playing nicely.

Mary McCarthy on J. D. Salinger: I don't like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn't a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don't like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it's so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egotism. I simply can't stand it.

James Dickey on Robert Frost: If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes....a more sententious, holding-forth old bore, who expected every hero-worshipping adenoidal little twerp of a student-poet to hang on his every word I never saw.

Click the link above to read forty-eight more.