Deborah Bogen

This is not a question anyone asks me. It's one I ask myself - often these days. Because I'm deep in story-land trying to master a craft that is not mine. I'm a poet. I think I am. At least I was a poet. I used language in ways that were magical and mysterious to me as a writer, as a poet, as a woman. As a human being. I used words even as they used me - demanding expression, stretching and snaking along to mean things I could barely articulate. I both led and followed as they drifted, then dove into grottoes where shadows suggested meanings I had not anticipated. Their history fascinated me. Their power empowered me. Their weight bore me up.

But the stories I'm writing right now are much more straightforward. Read my stories and you'll know when you're at the beginning, the middle and the end. So why am I doing this other thing? Why are stories as essential to humans as food or dogs or horses or heroes. We have to tell them, hear them, write them, think about them, dream them and sing them. And I need to learn something now as I write them. Blindly. In faith.  Read More 

It is a coincidence, I know, that "home" and "om" rhyme, but I like to ignore that fact and take a deep breath of Pittsburgh -- of this particular house, this street, this desk, this window, this view. I like to relax into another long work event called "writing a novel" while going about the daily work of laundry and phone calls and dental appointments. There's no way I can make the writing go quickly (though I hope to make it go well) and there's no way to make it less scary, but there is this good place called home in which to do the work.

Stories do a lot to stitch the world together. When I started "Witch" I just took off writing and hoped the story and the characters knew what they were doing. It was energizing and exhausting at the same time, living for weeks in a strange dream world that created itself daily (and nightly) in my mind. The characters grew like real people, becoming more concrete, more determined, more willful until eventually I often found myself taking dictation from someone I was pretty sure I had made up.

So here I go again into the narrow crowded stinky streets of 13th century Paris where somehow men were able to conceive of great cathedrals to both inspire and control an illiterate populace. How did they manage the heights, the arches, the story-laden sculpture and the glorious stained glass? And at what costs were those spires driven into the sky? How many bones are in those foundations?

I hope you are off to a summer of good work, gardens and writing and music and the like. May our paths cross. And may you be well. Read More