About

About the Project

“Writing isn’t hard work; writing is hard play.” –Rick Demarinis

“I believe that the foundations of the literature are imagination and reminiscences, that’s why I never use notebooks. When you take a phrase from your book of notes, and put it into the text that you’re writing in a different moment of time and in a different mood, that phrase shrivels and dies. I recognize notebooks only as a genre.” –Konstantin Paustovsky

Whimwit.com was rebooted in December of 2007 to become an on-line writer’s notebook. Here, I post character and event sketches, observations on life as a writer (both written and drawn), interesting snippets from the research I am doing for my novel on samizdat in Odessa in the 1970s, and occasional thoughts on books, translations, and films. My aspiration is to update this site every day Monday through Friday and to post comic strips twice a week. I am, however, noted for being overly ambitious, and the best way to keep track of what I write is by subscribing.

The archived posts from this blog’s previous lives have been culled. Some of the remaining pre-December 2007 pieces were written from the points of view of my characters and should be considered fiction.

About the Author

Place of birth: Kherson, now Ukraine

Other places I’ve lived and worked:

  • Moscow and Zheleznovodsk, in Russia, where I have family;
  • The suburbs of Baltimore, where I first landed in the US;
  • The Philadelphia area, where I went to school at Swarthmore College;
  • Grenoble, France, where I spent a semester and learned how to ski;
  • Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, where I lived while working as a consultant in Toronto, Connecticutt, Miami, New Jersey, and Frankfurt;
  • Boston, where I earned an MFA in fiction from Boston University;
  • Austin, Texas, where I am now finishing a collection of stories and a novel;

    • Places to read my work: Here and in the upcoming Best New American Voices 2009 (out October-November 2008).