Morbidly, I watched and learned about a brilliant writer from the Iowa Workshop, who published a first novel in 1972 called “The Stones of Summer.??? The novel receives a handful of reviews, they are mostly strong.

We later learn that the Mossman burnt himself out writing his first novel out of grad school. “The Stones of Summer??? isn’t published by one of the big houses. Mossman doesn’t promote the book. Then novel winds up filed on the Obscurity shelf. The writer goes on to a life of anxiety attacks, 20 years of welding, and caring for his elderly mother before the film director tracks him down.

All of this is woven around the discussion of one-hit wonder novels, from Harper Lee to Joseph Heller (sort of) to J.D. Salinger (technically) to a few other writers I had heard of but haven’t yet read. Now many of those books are on my Amazon list and I somehow, strangely, feel more charged (or thankfully just as charged as I did before) about keeping up with my craft.

I could have shuffled off to bed after watching “The Stone Reader??? feeling like the game is tricked against me and so many of us post-MFA writers. I could have looked at the view of the publishing world as the driven-by-chance, cannibalistic venture that it appears to be. There’s plenty of testimony to that effect. In the moview, the writer’s teachers, colleagues, even his agent add evidence to the fact that Mossman was an inevitable victim of the writing and publishing process. But — and here’s the rub — for all of them he was also that brief champion of art, unforgettable yet forgotten, burning like fire, and yet ultimately dimmed. We could all end up like this. But the trying, the effort, the possibility of one person reading that book and feeling something… It’s all worth it.

Check out the film, if you haven’t. Let me know what you think.

I’ve gained and lost weight before, mostly from being careful about what I eat. But I’ve never been much for exercise. In fact, I hate exercise. Never enjoyed it. Truthfully, that probably has a lot to do with why I’ve always wanted to be a writer. And up to now, I believed I had to choose one way of life or the other: make time to write and create, or make time to be fit and healthy. As I get closer to my 40s (still a few years away, but still…), I think I may need to rewrite that part of my psyche.

Resorting to my familiar reference library, the Internet, hasn’t given me much to mull over. Searching for “fitness AND writers” or “writers AND exercise” doesn’t help much. So I turn to my fellow writers: how do you keep the belly rolls at bay? How do you foster a mind-body balance? Or is that part of your life–like mine–still in rough draft stages?