Gary Cohen Writes! The Official Blog of Critically Acclaimed Author Gary Cohen

  Happy Birthday Nancy! I had never heard of Gabriel García Márquez until my senior year of college. I don't think I'd heard the term magical realism until then either. My public school education, in a very good school system might I add, leaned heavily towards old, dead American white men.  Except in February.  In February we would get an old dead American black man.  Whoops! and my privilege is showing because when I say American I mean United States. Contiguous United States I think. Man, contiguous is a great word isn't it? Even if you didn't know what it meant you could kind of figure it out don't you think? In college I studied business and I was all business about studying business.  I took my electives based on the following criteria: 1. Did they start after 10 am? 2. Did they seem like they would be pretty easy? 3. What about 10:30? Anything start after 10:30? I think at least one semester I was able to finagle a 4 day a week schedule.  Maybe more ...

  I was a child who loved to read. Everyone in my family loved to read. We were book people. My father brought a shopping bag to the library and loaded it up at the new book section. My mother who worked so hard everyday would come home from work, slip into the rattiest nightgown you've ever seen and sit on the couch with a thick book while the rest of us sat and watched tv.  She never watched tv. She thought it was stupid. Which it is, but I love it.  My brother and sister were both voracious readers and could read really fast. Terrifyingly fast.  I was three years younger than my brother and he a year younger than my sister. So as a child I remember them tearing through thick books while I was still reading relatively slim ones. Books were not so long then.  I think that when writers were typing them out by hand they were a little more careful.  It wasn't until the advent of word processors that these 4-500 page books became the norm.  When I was ab...