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Work Report: January 2024

When I would ask my friend Quinton Duval how things were going, he would first report on his poetry, then update me on his wife Nancy, and lastly he might mention his job as an English professor at a community college where he toiled for thirty years.

“I got some good work done this weekend,” he would say, speaking of his writing. “Got a new poem almost ready to show.”

He considered writing poetry his work. Teaching English was his job, and he made a clear distinction between the two. I love that Quinton called crafting poems work. Knowing that most people in our society respect work and consider writing poems frivolous, he wanted to set the record straight about that.

When I had my brief commercial success as a writer in my late twenties, my life as an isolate was interrupted for a few years, during which time I met hundreds of people I would otherwise not have met. And I was surprised by how many of these people said to me, “Must be nice not to have to work anymore.” As if my success resulted from luck and not from thousands of hours of work learning to write well enough to create novels publishers would buy.

So… on the work front, I have been rewriting the sequel to my new book Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub and making good progress. The title of the sequel is Raaz & Oz: The Further Adventures of Healing Weintraub. I would characterize this second volume of Healing Weintraub adventures as a deeper, richer, funnier investigation into the lives of the members of the Weintraub collective, canine and human.

Note: Though not advertised as such, my collection of stories Why You Are Here and other stories is the prequel to Good With Dogs and Cats, all but one of the stories taking place in the town of Mercy and introducing the characters Helen Morningstar, Justin Oglethorpe, Ruben Higuera, and Eliana Levine, all of whom appear in the subsequent volumes of Weintraub adventures.

On the music work front, Marcia and I have been working at home and in Peter Temple’s studio with Peter at the helm making a new album of piano/cello tunes and piano solos entitled Ahora Entras Tu. The work has been exciting and surprising and inspiring.

We hope to have a new book and a new album of songs to share in 2024.

Here is a poem by Quinton Duval from his collection Like Hay, the volume of his final works published the year after Quinton died.

LUCK

Lucky I am to have crossed

the ocean in a liner, watched

yellow dozers cover a beached

whale with sand. I chant

the mantra of the coral

snake, whistle the uncertain

song of the meadowlark,

sing the call of local geese

that won’t leave their cushy pond.

Lucky to have loved, in my way,

women who loved me back.

The golden age of love was back there

and we didn’t even know it.

To read poems to a dying friend,

something, with luck, a friend will do

for me—poetry, anything stormy

and vibrating on the tongue:

a tornado washed a sky green

in Indiana;

a hurricane tore the steeple off

the church with God’s howling wind;

an earthquake turned the swimming pool

into a small, wave-tossed sea.

Still, I come back to this harbor,

a room with table, lamp, window.

That river could be the Loire.

That sky could be the gray underside

of heaven. That rain, well,

that could be the world collecting

itself, a silver bullet in each drop.

Quinton Duval (1948-2010)