Hack Writer
Poems, Stories, Plays
by
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From Siberian Women and the Red Moon
MELODY: I shall be the visiting prostitute at Cape St. James College. The resource on whom the students can write their papers. I am a natural resource. I am better than any book. My life is a book. They can study me, interview me, do whatever they want with me. It’ll be educational. I mean I can have an office with a chair and desk. And I will write the story of my life and in one chapter I meet a boy and that boy is crazy about Emily Dickinson. So we drive all the way from Texas, which is where I am originally from, to Amherst on a pilgrimage like to go to Emily Dickinson’s house and see her room and all and all the way he’s reciting Emily Dickinson poems to me and singing them to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." Anyhow it was great stopping at motels along the way, drinking, having sex, and smoking cigarettes. That was the life!
We got to the house and it was closed and you couldn’t go in unless you were some big fat literary muckety-muck. The boy was so disappointed. We were determined to see Emily’s room so we hung around Amherst all day. We found a skid row dive bar and drank and smoked and made a plan to break in and f**k in her bed with a cool breeze jostling the white curtains. We were lousy at breaking and entering and we weren’t sure what room it was. We were laughing and falling all over each other and dropping the hammer and screwdriver we bought from a hardware store. We got arrested. With a letter from Cape St. James College I reckon I can do research in that room there and fulfill a dream that boy had. I don’t care one way or the other, I mean, six of one half a dozen of the other. But since he can’t fulfill that dream, someone has to. Corey, I mean Professor Cain here can show me the ropes of getting it done. And in return for my hard work and sacrifice, the college gives me a free four year education and since I’m writing a book about me, I reckon, I’ll get a degree in human nature, which is creative writing. There ain’t nothing more human than creative writing, because creative writing is about human behavior. Now, if those human’s would just behave themselves, we’ll be all right.
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About the Book
In Hack Writer, Dan Sklar’s writing is the plain speaking language of Walt Whitman. It is what Henry David Thoreau would call the poetry of "healthy speech." The themes are strictly middle-class and as direct as a green Buick. The poems are easy to get at--real and personal because everything is personal. The stories are the sensitive stuff of American literature. The plays are in the absurd tradition of the Marx Brothers--George S. Kaufman. Hack Writer is a bright house filled with music. It is the fact that our happiness will be dreams.
About the Author
Dan Sklar’s work has been most recently published in The New York Quarterly, American Jones Building and Maintenance, Paper Boat Magazine, ProCreation, Kimera: A Journal of Fine Writing, Sightings, Modern Haiku, Tight, Fan, Nebo: A Literary Journal, The Baybury Review, Writer to Writer, Orbis, Curbside Review, Chase Park, Wavelength, bowWOW, the University of California’s, Into the Teeth of the Wind, and Urban Spaghetti. His book, Straightforward: Plays, Poems, Stories, was published by Simon and Schuster in January 1998. His plays have been seen Off Broadway and throughout New England. His play, The Day Frank Sinatra Died, was performed by the Endicott Players in the spring of 1998, and in November by the Playwrights’ Platform group in Boston. Dan was the featured poet in the spring creative writing series at Salem State College and read his work there on March 8, 1999. His play, Siberian Women and the Red Moon was performed by the Endicott Players in April 1999. His short story Scotch and Love and Adultery appeared in The Baybury Review in the summer 2000 issue. He teaches writing at Endicott College and lives in Salem with his wife, Denise, and two sons, Maxfield and Samuel.