Threes, the Third, at Bennington College

From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman.
It was at Bennington College, formerly an all-woman’s school gone co-ed seven years previous–450 women and 150 men at the time of my attendance–that I met my third great writing teacher, Nick Delbanco, and my third great friend, Marc Falcone. Bennington dorms were two-story, white New England clapboard houses abutting [...]

Growing Beyond, From the Diary of Joseph Kaufman

After Mr. Benson, my 9th grade Marine writing teacher, I had no writing teacher for the rest of high school—there simply were no creative writing classes at Pittsfield High School from 1970-1973. Rather, in English class, we read Dickens and Twain and Hawthorne and wrote ten page papers about their significance—I don’t even think I [...]

Memories of Mr. Benson

My first writing teacher was Mr. Benson, a former Marine, at Theodore Herbert Middle School in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Mr. Benson had a high forehead and crew-cut hair, plus a good selection of striped, club ties. He wore starched, button-down shirts of various yuppie shades, West Point-creased trousers, and wing-tip shoes. [...]

Collaboration in Fiction and Fact

I’m quite the ostrich with my head in the sand at times. And so when I began hearing about writing circles, post World Wide Web, I thought it was a new phenomena centered around new technology.  Writing circles are no newer than any group of people getting together to further a common cause – in [...]

Book Model Variant 1

Sometimes an author has a great idea for a book, but can’t get a nibble from a publisher. What’s he supposed to do? The first step involves risk. Either the author invests a great deal of time looking for an agent to sell the idea to a publisher, which cuts into any future royalties the [...]

Reminiscing about Mr. Malamud

(by Joseph Kaufman)
From sleeting March rain to the humid, late-May sun, Mr. Malamud taught his one class a year, ten sessions in all. Some years he taught a course in the short story, replete with reading list and papers to write; other years he taught a writing seminar, the semester’s goal of which was to [...]

An Author Platform Sells the Author

I heard an interesting statistic the other day from another publisher. They were trying to setup an online store with one of the leading online bookstores, but were being frustrated in their attempts because they could get no support from the online store. Every time they called or emailed they got the same response: “I’m [...]

Inbetween, Then on to Bennington College

(by Joseph Kaufman)
And so in 1975, after two years at the University of Vermont, my close friend transferred to Vassar and I took a year off and flew to Israel. I lived on two kibbutzim, Ein Charod M’euchad and Gevulot, where I drove tractors in orange groves and stamped sun-warmed cotton in big steel-mesh containers [...]

Early Literary Influences

(by Joseph Kaufman)
The Pittsfield, Massachusetts of the sixties that I grew up in was a blue-collar enclave of Catholics and Protestants. It was hardly a literary hotbed though Normal Mailer lived for a while in Stockbridge and William Shirer in Lenox. Historically, in the late nineteenth century, Hawthorne and Melville resided collegially in the Berkshires, [...]

How I Didn’t Go To Woodstock

(From Joseph Kaufman)
The roots of The Legend of Cosmo & the Archangel took place in August, 1969. I was 13 and a junior counselor at a day camp for boys called Camp Sumner, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Sumner was an old camp, my father as a boy had gone there before me, and it was located [...]

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