Word to the Wise

I don't know about anyone else, but my brain isn't big enough to fully grasp all of what Jake Adam York said at the April 22 Writer's Buzz, but what I did get reassured me. In the course of his talk on Originality and the Writer, York was able to make the audience laugh, cry, and take copious notes. What else can you ask for on a beautiful Saturday morning? (The tears came not from any tough love on his part, but from the content of his gorgeously tragic poetry depicting an ugly time in our collective history. Check out "Elegy for James Knox," which stunned all of us with its last line.)

Also, York kindly pointed out, through a rhetorical question he'd asked his class, the anxiety of the original writer is misplaced. ("Who can think of something no one's ever thought before?" he asked his undergrads. One kid raised his hand and said he'd thought of something. York responded, "How will you ever communicate to us what it is?")

A handful of us took York out to lunch after--a budding Buzz tradition--from which our guest had to rush in order to pick up a special order of mint julep sorbet at a local sorbet factory (there was one?). A man with many hats, York left us wondering: What great delicacy, its sorbet come round at last, slouches toward Denver to be eaten?Check out Murder Ballads today! You won't regret it.

--AD