Month: April 2011

See you all in a day and a half at Literary Orange. If you’re going, get there early; I hear that it’s easy to get lost on campus. My panel will speaking at 1030 a.m. sharp at the UC Irvine event center. We’ll talk about voice, place and memoir (I hear that some folks who missed the last Northern California event will be there.) I’m signing books from 1130 to 1230 and then I’ll stay for the whole thing. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tobias Wolff wishes he could say that reading Thomas Mann started him out on the road to becoming an author. He remembers reading an interview with Susan Sontag in which she talked about reading Mann and Soren Kierkegaard when she was still in grade school. Sontag even managed to meet Mann in Los Angeles when she was a teenager. “She was very precocious,” Wolff said, dryly, during his opening remarks at the first night of UCSC’S Living Writers Series, which drew a capacity crowd to the Humanities Lecture Hall on Thurday. Each one of us has an author like that, Wolff said. “You look back and think about who it was that made you store up extra batteries in your flashlight so you could stay up reading, and put towels under the doorway so your parents couldn’t see the light shining in the room.” For Wolff, a creative writing professor…