I find it hard to care about lawn care. My lawn looks like I am a small-scale farmer and my crop is dandelions. I would estimate that, of a square foot of my yard, about 30% would qualify as some kind of grass. This evening I noticed these gorgeous patches of dark grass that had risen above all the rest of the grass since the last mowing. Standing in the driveway I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if my entire lawn were that stuff?” Upon closer inspection I realized it’s crabgrass.
My neighbors treat their lawns with sprays and spreads. One neighbor laid sod this spring. This is the second time I’ve had a neighbor lay sod. We all know how great sod looks on a new lawn. But do you know how great it looks next to my lawn? It is like sitting next to a guy at a wedding who’s wearing a $5,000 suit.

Every time I am out raking, picking up sticks from the dozen or so mature trees on my lot, or pulling weeds from the flowerbed every few years, all I can think about is that I’ll turn 50 this year, my father died at 58 of a massive heart attack, and I have 30 years of writing projects laying dormant in my study. I want to write. I don’t care about having a beautiful lawn. I don’t even care about having a lawn at all!
So here’s my solution. Writer Ranches. Let’s create subdivisions for writers. There will be a common building which will house space for entertaining and writing workshops. Each house will be four rooms: an eat-in kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a study. These houses will be inexpensive, zero-maintenance structures. And what will we do with all the money we’ve saved from such inexpensive housing? Hire groundskeepers, of course.

I have started the last class of my MFA program. My last graduate writing workshop is three weeks gone. But there is a hitch. There is a reality that doesn’t match.
The pace at which I am learning about the craft of writing fiction is only accelerating. I am nowhere near being a Master. I am only now learning how to write.
I sit down to write each day and each hour I spend with the page leaves behind some aspect, some clearer sense of the craft of making story. I’ll submit my thesis in a year when I sense I should be submitting a request for admission. But this is education’s success, the pointing out to us what we do not know.

So what is the one greatest thing I have learned? It is this. I can recognize bad work.
I can see it. I can see why a piece or passage isn’t working. I can choose the separation of author and reader and look at a draft of my own work and judge it for what it is. I can look at a fellow writer’s work and call it good as well as lacking.
To have obtained the skill – be it in writing, science, business, or sport – to judge good work from bad and confidently discuss one’s judgment is a fine and necessary achievement. It is an achievement that will satisfy the academy and a skill that will serve this practitioner for the rest of his life.

A pair of weeks ago I went to a reading by the author Jonathan Franzen. He read from his new novel (just finished, not yet published) and took a fair amount of Q&A. Someone asked a question about “why he thought people should read stories” or some derivative of that. Franzen, as he’d done all evening, took the question and went where he wished. Most of the questions were as poor as this one, so I’m glad he did that.

He answered by saying that he doesn’t think people should read stories. He said he doesn’t see it as some sort of cultural dictate. Stories are for escape. They are optional. Then he talked about TV. He said that he wrote an essay called “Why Bother” for Harper’s [now his most well-known essay] in which he spoke of TV as the enemy. He said that he’s changed his mind on that and now sees the cable TV drama as a sister to the novel.
Nearly everything we consume, said Franzen, is in tiny bites and is often a comment on something someone has produced, or a comment on a comment on something someone has produced. Cable TV dramas are the last place, besides the novel, where you can get lost for five or six hours (via Netflix) in a story and in the lives of characters unlike you. Both cable TV dramas and the modern novel are successors to the nineteenth century social novel – Dickens for example – where people went to learn about other people, cultures and places.

Now, I don’t watch cable TV dramas. (Although I’m beginning to think I’m missing some good literature.) I saw one episode of “The Wire” several years ago, and I’ve seen a little bit of Downton Abbey – who hasn’t? But Franzen is making sense here. Indeed, as he said while he was signing my books, “we have to find friends where we can”.
So here are the battle lines. On one side we have a fragmented universe with no through-line (e.g. your FaceBook news feed) and on the other side we have the long-form story. One could say both have their place, but I guess you can easily figure out which camp I’m in. Just follow me on Twitter @marshjdavid.

I took my mom to dinner at the Greenwood Park Mall food court the other evening. I try to do this at least every other week, usually on Friday nights. We eat at Chick-Fil-A or the pizza place near the entrance. Once I got her some kind of chicken from the Chinese place, but she said it was too sweet. I had to agree.
Every time we go it is the first time she has been there. My mom has Alzheimer’s.

I usually struggle with what to talk about over dinner. Often the degree of struggle is guided by her degree of lucency that particular evening. Sometimes I just respond to whatever comes out her. I verify that relatives long dead are indeed dead or reassert family happenings that are months if not years old.
But this most recent evening she was as good as she’s been in a long while, and we got on the subject of writing.
Mom told me that she wrote a couple of dozen articles when I was a kid and how later she was a free-lance editor for some journals. We talked about my novel-in-progress, how it came to its current structure, my professors’ support of it, writing every day, and what to write next – David and Bathsheba or Samson and Delilah. We talked about David and how he abused his power. We talked about Samson and about Nazirite vows.

It was fun to talk to mom about writing. I also felt like maybe it was somehow, even for a few minutes, thawing her brain. “I don’t know how I started to write,” she said in response to a question I hadn’t asked, “I just did.”
It saddened me that her response to our chat was to contemplate, for a few minutes, writing a book. “I don’t know what I’d write about…it would take a lot of time, but it’s better than watching TV.” I told her it is a lot better than watching TV. I didn’t tell her that she might as well consider becoming an astronaut.

Then I thought again. What’s so sad about it? Nothing. In fact, quite the opposite.
For a few minutes the other night she had a dream, an aspiration. The conversation had made her feel alive. For a few minutes, among the thousands spent in the fog of her illness, she felt like there was a thing she might grasp.
So she mused aloud. Talking with me, there in the food court, about what might yet [never] be.

This morning the task of writing a novel seems to be an especially great effort.
I imagine one day standing before a room of readers and getting a question about the process of writing. I imagine answering them as only a survivor of such an ordeal can. I imagine my answer being a metaphor bulging with wit and meaning – because this is what they expect of me.
“How many of you have put together a 5000-piece puzzle?” I’d get a few hands, and then I’d lay it out for them.
“OK. How many of you have composed a photograph – setting up every detail of lighting, framing, filter and angle – and taken the photograph, on film, set up a darkroom with all the tubs of chemicals and rinse baths and developed the print, on paper that you buy 500 sheets at a time, then went and cut down a tree and took the sawdust and mixed it with a compound made of raw materials procured from the hardware store and your garden – which you tilled and fertilized and planted in the spring for the purpose, molded the sawdust into a block using a form you built from the lumber from the same tree and then with a handsaw cut the block into slices of paperboard, which you soaked, dried, and pressed, glued the now dry photograph onto the paperboard with an adhesive you made from raw materials procured from the hardware store and your garden, cut the giant photo-card up into 5000 pieces with your pocket knife, and then put it together, whittling, filing, and sanding each piece as you went so that they’d fit perfectly together, all while not compromising the quality of the photograph?”
I imagine no one raising their hand except me, a few of my MFA buddies, and maybe a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon sitting in the back row.

Did you know that this is National Poetry Month? “Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April” (www.poets.org).
Part of the celebration is held tomorrow, April 24th. It is Poem in Your Pocket Day. The idea is that you take a favorite poem, and you carry it with you all day, sharing it with colleagues, peers, and friends – whomever you meet.
I did this last year with Tim, a fellow at work, and we’ll do it again tomorrow. Last year I carried Nostalgia by Billy Collins (you can listen to it at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audioitem/2698). I remember sitting in Tim’s office and reading it to him. Tim still remembered a line or two from it this week and was able to help me find the title of it again so that I could include it for you here. If I am not mistaken (and there is a darn good chance I am) Tim carried a Shel Silverstein piece. I’m sorry, Tim, I don’t remember which one.
Regardless, this simply illustrates to me the entire point of National Poetry Month. Here are a couple of guys sitting in a corporate office in the middle of Indiana, in the middle of a busy workday reading poetry to each other.
Tim and I have an appointment set up in Outlook for 11AM Eastern, tomorrow morning, to celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day. This year I will be carrying “Two Sides of a Story” by Aaron Belz. This is a poem from his book “The Bird Hoverer” (http://belz.net/) I am really looking forward to reading this poem to Tim. It is crazy great.
So, here’s your assignment. Go find a poem that you really like. Don’t read poetry?* Pick a song – most of them are poems. Print the lyrics and put that piece of paper in your pocket. Pull it out tomorrow and read it to someone. Anyone.
Know that you are part of a movement.

*You need to start moving in that direction. Subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac podcast and get one great poem in your earbuds every day. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/podcast/

Did you know that this is National Poetry Month? “Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April” (www.poets.org).
In celebration, the Danville Public Library here in Danville Indiana, has a poetry contest every year. They collect submissions all month and then judge and award cash prizes in early May. It is called the Melba Geoffroy Memorial Poetry Contest.
[Yes, you read correctly. There is a small-town public library offering cash prizes for poetry! Thank you, Melba! All is NOT lost!]
I am a fiction writer, but this is the second year in a row that I will submit poetry to the contest in order to support the important effort by our small local public library to promote a critically important art form.
Last year I submitted a traditional, non-form piece and was awarded second place in the adult division. I was delighted and humbled. This year however, I will be submitting haiku*.
This is by happenstance, but I think it is also in keeping with the spirit of this poetic form. One day last month, while writing, I happened to look up and out my desk window to see that it was snowing – one of those spring snows where there is no wind and the flakes come in huge clusters and fall like cotton on the grass. It struck me as poetic, if you will, so I captured the moment in time by jotting down a few phrases of reflection. Later, I read the phrases I saw in them a kernel, a seed.
I have concluded that one doesn’t write a haiku; instead the haiku is spotted in everyday life and then revealed in the laying out of the language. This sounds a bit mystical, but to anyone who does creative work, it is a fact.
One thing is for sure, the DPL poetry judges will be counting syllables this year.

*For an excellent primer/reader on haiku, you can’t do better than “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa”, Edited by Robert Hass.