jennifercoke.com

After two years and six months, the revised novel is finally out the door. In the damn mail, dude. You’d think I feel an enormous sense of relief. You’d be so wrong. I’m still waiting for the elation. I’m not even close to feeling it. Maybe I haven’t internalized that the enforced morning march to [...]

Been thinking a lot about China lately. The earthquake, most particularly. But, my friendship with my Shanghaiese neighbor and cardio-walking partner—heightened now that she’s on the brink of moving to the South Bay—has also pulled China into a unique kind of focus. At the end of our morning walk, Fei-Fei and I stop in a [...]

Wow, you guys. Thanks for all your very flattering emails about my piece “Blue Black Berry,” newly published in Fringe Magazine. Isn’t it supremely paradoxical that a piece so flagrantly autobiographical—vintage photos and all—should butt right up against my blogged denial that my current novel is sheer fiction? “Blue Black Berry” is all me. Fiction [...]

Tell the truth. When you read a novel, is the protagonist the author on the back cover? I’m asking, because more than three times already, someone has slipped and called me by the name of the main character in my new piece, “Grace Notes.” Oops. Okay, she’s a Jamaican woman who lives in Park Slope, [...]

I, of course, should be slashing and tightening and tweaking the 420 pages of the novel. But, what am I doing? Squandering an hour or more making an avatar of myself. As we say in Jamaica, cu ya (look at this): It made my husband laugh–he thought it was cute. I only WISH I looked [...]

Christ the Redeemer
Brazil

So, yah, I know. I haven’t written here since last Christmas. Thanks for wanting to know what’s up with me. I’ve been writing, basically. Pulling prose and chaffering with myself. And avoiding the pull of writing here—which is infinitely easier. And a bleeding thief of time. But, look. It’s September, and after 130 new pages, [...]

I never read the guidebooks before we travel. To me it’s like opening presents early. Plus I feel I don’t really need to know too much beforehand—the beloved drools over the planning, the books, the maps. All I need do is show up and make sure I don’t have a derisive amount of stuff packed. [...]

…Stumbling upon this link was like being kissed hard… This week I was doing research for my novel, and all of a sudden I had tears on my face. One of my fictional guys is Terrence Yee Fat. He’s a biracial, bisexual Jamaican man mostly because I need him to represent the kind of duality, [...]

[Click on all photos to enlarge; toggle F11 for full screen] Fog Breath

I got off the hospital elevator, looked up, and found myself outside the morgue. It’s unobtrusive, of course, the morgue. I only knew I was standing outside the door because there was a man there, 65 or older, a confused man with a very deep limp, loud in saying he was supposed to pick up [...]

Some friends, a couple, had us over for dinner one cold, cold evening in New York. We were having the usual catching-up chit chat over wine and preliminary finger food — trips taken, health of elderly parents, the usual. The husband, a doctor, mentioned a friend who had found himself in a terrible situation: The [...]

Haven’t been here lately. Two reasons, mainly: One, the demands of rewriting the accurséd novel. Which is an insistent elephant foot on my chest. I cannot allow myself to write here because blogging squanders time. Big time. It was Calvin Trillin, I believe, who confessed that he feels pressure every time he has to write [...]