Why am I blogging?

Hi. I have been writing most of my life and I write something every day, so my daughter Lauren told me I ought to blog, I am about to have my 77th birthday, so you might imagine I hate the word "blog" but here I am nevertheless blogging. What have been writing all these years?

Well, lots of school work to start with. I spent six years in graduate school, so lots of term papers and theses. I have graduate majors in English, history and philosophy. A master's thesis was on David Hume's Theory of Criticism. All of the school papers have long been lost, thankfully.

So fast forward to my first (and only) novel, Time To Murder and Create. From the time I was 12 I wanted to be a novelist. I made numerous attempts in my late teens and twenties and never got beyond the first chapter. Seemed I labored over first chapters forever, wanting to write the Great American Novel. My early writing attempts were all stuffy, florid, pompous and strained. At the University of Chicago I had a great teacher, the novelist Richard Sterne. He suggested I write as I spoke. I have been doing that ever since. I wrote Murder and Create as an experiment. I told myself to forget about writing the Great American Novel and write a mystery novel. I gave myself an assignment: write 10 or more pages every day, whether I felt like it or not, and at the end of 3o days I should have a mystery novel. I think it was well written. A New York agent liked it and had a few suggestions. I followed her advice and resubmitted it. Then she had a few more suggestions, and then a few more. However, I one told her that a few of the characters in the story were based on actual people, and they had read the manuscript and were happy to be in it. But I guess this may have worried her, as she dropped me. And I dropped further attempts to publish it. Later I thought what she wanted me to do was to write a number of other mysteries with the same "detective" character. However, my character was myself.

You see, the thesis of the novel was this: A murder of a TV art critic was discovered in an art galery during an exhibition of an artist's sculpture. This critic had given a thumbs down review or the art on display. So the main suspect was the artist whose work was criticized.

Another critic, the main character in my novel, who liked the work on display very much, thought the murder was "created" as a "work of art." At the time, there was a lot of art being made which was extensions of artists bodies. Some of it was almost self destructive. Thinking like an art historian, he thought if he could attribute the art to an particular artist, he could thereby identify the murderer.

Well, you see I was the art critic/sleuth. I wrote art criticism for major art journals for several decades. Almost all of my published writings have been feature articles in Art International, artscanada, At New England and other art journals. I also wrote monographs and exhibition catalogs. My critical writings opened up opportunities to work in museums and art institutions, so as chief curator of The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and subsequently director of other art galleries and venues, I continued to write about artists whose works I exhibited. So, you see, following the usual advice to young writers, when I wrote Murder and Create, I was writing "about what I knew."