Pushcart!

After years of nominating outstanding work from West Branch for the Pushcarts, we're delighted to learn that one of our writers finally got one: congratulations to Jean Nordhaus, who won a Pushcart for her poems in WB #56.

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Bit by bit, I've been re-reading Paul Monette's novel Afterlife. When I first read it about ten years ago, I was deep in the grief zone of having lost David. This story of a loose group of "AIDS widows" had a strong emotional resonance. It still does, but now I can see how the writing careers unevenly--a brilliant, one-line characterization (two power brokers haggle by phone over a Hollywood contract, navigating loopholes "delicate as crochet") followed a couple pages later by a cheesy B-movie passage (bared chests under the gibbous moon). Still, I don't mind the tonal roller coaster. Monette was under enormous pressure to complete his last few manuscripts (he fully believed he'd die before finishing Borrowed Time). I'll take the high with the low. Even his brilliant memoir Becoming a Man, which won the National Book Award, has its off-key moments, though it's certainly tighter than Last Watch of the Night, which veers into shrillness at times. The latter feels more like this novel: I sense the writer working in haste, resorting to easy tropes and tricks at times in order to race forward.

I remember, too, feeling such a connection with Stephen, the protagonist of Afterlife, and with how he tries to find a way to pick up the threads of his life. . . Only a few people (including Jim Elledge, who published it and suggested I change the title) know that my first chapbook, Amateur Grief, was initially titled Afterlife in homage to Paul Monette's work.

Does anyone else still read (or remember) this man's (critical, in my view) prose? I'd love to see a symposium on his influence upon today's queer writers.