Several weeks now since the last issue, and I feel bad. They have been busy weeks, stacked with reading, teaching, writing, and all the other stuff that comes between; life, I suppose you could call it.

First, a catalog of the recent books to appear on the desk. While up at the residency in Cambridge, I found An American Type by Henry Roth, published posthumously last year and now in paper. It’s not at all bad, very good in spots (I’m still at the beginning), and reminds me here and there of, say, Fitzgerald at his breeziest. What is odd and beautiful is that the best of it displays the muscularity and vigor of a much younger writer, if I can generalize in so crude a fashion. It’s like reading the lost novel of a mid-century master. It’s not nearly so good as the greatest of that generation, I’m led to expect by the lackluster review quotes in the opening pages; but if I can stick with it, I’ll likely have my own opinion.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford was mentioned by a fellow teacher, and so I picked that up as well. Speak, Memory by Nabokov was used in a seminar I sat in on, and while I had not been drawn to it before because there is little about his writing life in the book — it covers his early life — I was taken by the beauty of the passages read aloud and had to bring it into the workshop.

A bunch of craft books: On Writing by Stephen King; Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird; and David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, which I’d read before and liked. I realized in putting together the study plans for my four new students, I could recommend only one or two craft titles; most being lightweight or lame. So I got hold of these to see if I can broaden my craft shelf. Also Matterhorn, The Eyes of Willie McGee, Claudette Colvin, and Tender is the Night.

But, to the teaching. There’s so much about teaching creative writing that I have to learn. Coming from a practitioner’s background, with so many books behind me, and more on their way, I find that while I may have the knowledge, I don’t have the technique to teach. Yet.

It’s a fascinating and vibrant area of thought and discussion, as all the long-time teachers out there already know. Erika Dreifus, Cathy Day, Stephanie Vanderslice, Mark McGurl — these are people I’m just beginning to read about, all theorizers (perhaps contradictory) about the pedagogy of the MFA system, none of them particularly known or known yet as novelists or creative writers, but with many intelligent things to say that I need to hear and consider.

Certainly, I’d love to someday be in the position of a Robert Frost or William Faulkner, standing frosty-haired in front of a class and simply reading my work, or, at most, answering questions with wit and grace; but until that time, I want to absorb the complicated and worthy art of teaching. Sure, I have to fit it in between all the book deadlines, but I’d like to believe it’s all a matter of, and only a matter of, time.