Jill and I were startled Sunday morning when, lounging in our library, we spied a big hawk perched in the tree just outside our bay window. As we were three floors up, the hawk was at eye-level. It had a rust-colored breast, a large hooked beak, an eaglish head, and ruffed leggings. A regal bird, as imposing as a gargoyle. The minute I raised my camera for a shot, the hawk winged away and I caught only sky.

We live in the city, mind you. You could call our row-house neighborhood mid-town. Yards are modest, asphalt plentiful. But we do have hawks. The one in question we’ve been watching for about two weeks. Mostly we’ve seen him gliding high above the alleyway behind our house. No doubt the pigeons interest him. Maybe the rats too. He’s a Cooper’s Hawk. A big bird, with a wingspan about 28 inches across, he belongs to the Accipiter family. According to Ken Kaufman’s bird guide, they “are short-winged, long-tailed hawks, built for agility and bursts of high speed … They eat many smaller birds, catching them by surprise.”

Though endangered in some states, Cooper’s Hawks have been finding homes increasingly in urban areas – like so many wild animals (coyotes in particular). They are notable for strangling their prey, never using their beaks for killing. We felt immediately protective of this one and everyday, as we scour the sky for his imposing profile, we wish him much good hunting. He may be passing through. It’s hard to say. It may be that the Cooper’s is hunkering down for a lean spell like the rest of us.

Whenever I see a bird, especially a big one, I remind myself that I am looking at a dinosaur or, rather, its closest relative. It has been posited that the fearful myth of winged dragona came to us from our ancient ancestors, who – much smaller than we — lived in real fear of raptors like the eagle and the hawk. This may explain why, when I see a big hawk perched on the swannish neck of a freeway light pole, I am thrilled in a way that exceeds explanation.

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I’m the president of AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. Every year we bring our members together for a 3-day conference. Last year we were in New York City. It was our biggest conference ever – 8,500 attendees – and we didn’t think we’d break that number. But we did break it at this year’s conference in Chicago, where, just last week, we drew 8,700. We were surprised and gratified. The nation’s tanked economy has all of us worried, naturally, and we writers are hunkering down for hard times.

The AWP represents about 30,000 writers, 80 writing centers and conferences, and 500 writing programs at colleges and universities in the U.S., Canada, and England. Our aim is to make creative writing – novels, stories, poems, and plays – a vital part of everyday life. We encourage young people to read, for example. We also advocate for writers’ rights and lobby for arts funding. Our culture, you may have noticed, celebrates anything that makes money and often looks with suspicion on endeavors, like writing, that don’t. There’s so little money in writing poems and plays and stories that most writers in this country make their living doing something other than writing. Most of the money made in writing novels, for example, goes to a handful of writers like Daniel Steele and Stephen King. That’s the marketplace.

At the AWP conference, you’ll find some very high-powered writers—names you’ve heard, like E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, Lucille Clifton. But mostly you’ll find everyday writers like me. Still, it can be intimidating walking those crowded conference hallways where, at any moment, you might see a writer who is very successful. In some ways, the conference is an unnatural, even unsettling, experience: where else can you find yourself surrounded by 8,000 writers? But it can be comforting too, surrounded by others who are doing what you’re doing, especially when your work is, in many ways, isolating.

You’ll find two kinds of events at the AWP conference: readings and panel presentations. The presentations cover all aspects of the writing world, from teaching to website building to book promotion. One of the most exciting developments in the writing world, as far as I’m concerned, is the increasing use of mixed media – illustrated novels, graphic novels, e-novels. It used to be that publishers scoffed at writers who would attempt to illustrate their work, for example. It was thought that the use of illustrations in “serious” works was condescending to the reader, who could envision things well enough on his or her own; and so illustrations were limited to children’s books (though you’d think that children themselves could well imagine all they needed when reading).

Another development we’ve seen is that the big presses – the ones you’ve heard of, like Simon and Schuster, Random House, Knopf – have consolidated so much and limited their scope in so many ways that small presses — the ones you may not have heard of, like Sarabande, Autumn House, Dzanc — have taken on the hard work of promoting literature that does not fit easily into the mainstream marketeers’ categories. If you’re pitching a book to the big presses, for example, you’re supposed to describe how your book is like (and better than) a similar book that has made lots of money. But what if the book you’ve written isn’t like any other book the big presses are publishing? What we see is the big presses increasingly playing it safe. But, really, no one can predict what will or won’t be a hit.

The most common lament we heard in the hallways of the convention is that it’s harder to publish now than ever before, even though publishers are producing more books than ever (about 200,000 a year). The majority of those books are informational, like cookbooks. The small presses keep the majority of America’s novelists, poets, and story-writers in circulation. There were 500 small presses at the AWP convention’s book fair. How they will survive in these hard times is hard to predict. Which is why it’s important to support your local arts organization and to ask your senators to do the same. The good news is that the Obama administration is showing support for the arts. All of us at the convention we relieved when we heard that the National Endowment for the Arts got an increase in funding this year.

Here are a handful of small-press books that came to my hands during the recent convention: Poema by Maurice Kilwein-Guevara, Slipping the Moorings by Susan McCallum-Smith, The Last Predicta by Chad Davidson, Elephants in Our Bedroom by Michael Czyniejewski, and Riding Shotgun (Women Write about Their Mothers) edited by Kathryn Kysar.

By the way, you don’t have to be a member of AWP to attend the conference. Next year we will gather in Denver to compare notes and talk about the state of writing (and reading) in America. Maybe I’ll see you there.

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I fell on Saturday. Down the porch stairs, about six feet, face first. I was gripping an antique kitchen sink made of ceramic. It was heavy but not too heavy, I thought. Jill, below me, had to leap out of the way. It happened fast, as these things do: I tipped forward, knew I wasn’t going to right myself, said a four-letter word, then I was down.

We had spent the day moving a lot of heavy items – a couch and a stove for our friend Vanessa, then a dual-tub soapstone utility sink, and a grand piano. We bought the piano at an auction to replace the irreparable one that had sat in our living room for five years. Most people think that because it’s big and pretty – and a complicated instrument – an old piano should be worth a lot of money. The opposite is true. Most pianos you see in antique stores are worthless, unless you’re willing to spend a lot rebuilding the thing. It doesn’t matter what they look like. Our piano technician friend, David Hughes, who is nationally renown for his expertise in piano repair, told us it’d cost about $27,000. to refurbish the old one we had. It just so happened that, last week, we spied a piano coming up in a local auction. A 1968 Yahama G-2. So we asked Mr. Hughes to look at it. This piano had hardly ever been played, apparently. It was even in tune mostly. Mr. Hughes said, “Get it.” So we did.

A word about moving pianos yourself: Don’t do it. Let the experts have that headache. The only reason we did it ourselves was because we had all that other stuff to move. Oh, I forgot to mention the radiator. We had to remove one of the two radiators from the living room bay in order to accommodate the new piano – because the dual radiators in that space are really bad for the instrument. You have no idea how much a radiator weights. Really. A six-fin 1890’s iron radiator, about waist high, weighs at least 250 pounds.

We hired our friend, Les, to supervise the move and employed his cousin too. Les is a moving genius. Getting a grand up our front stairs and around our stoop is more than a little difficult. Just as difficult was the two-tub utility sink. It weighs about 300 pounds. The problem isn’t just the weight, it’s the bulk and the lack of hand-holds. Instead of carrying out the old (cracked) concrete utility sink that had been in our basement, I took a sledgehammer to it and broke it up, then we carted it our in fragments. Anything to save our backs. .

So, by the end of the day, we were beat. But I had that one ceramic sink to haul to Jill’s car. As I felt myself losing my balance at the top of the stairs, I didn’t have time to be scared. There was no knife stab of panic. I was simply disappointed. When our species roamed the plains, staying afoot was a matter of life or death. Rarely, if ever, did our kind lay flat out on the ground. So strong is our need to stay on foot that, even in sleep, we are on guard. That’s why we wake with a start when a nerve misfires in our leg and makes us think, in the murk of dreamland, that we’ve just stepped in a hole and are going down. My disappointment at the moment of falling grew from this understanding — some atavistic recollection that told me, “oh no, this is not the way it’s supposed to be.” Then, in that second of recognition, I imagined the great inconvenience of toppling, of injuring myself and breaking a leg or worse.

I’m not sure how I tripped. It could have been a loose shoe string, it could have been that I should have leaned back instead of forward. Between the falling and its aftermath, I can recall nothing, not a single detail of my impact. It was, oddly, a fairly soft fall. I landed on top of the ceramic sink, which shattered. Then I opened my eyes and rolled over, taking a quick inventory of the damage. My eyeglasses stayed on my face. I recalled the time, years ago, when my old car hit a patch of black ice on a Wisconsin freeway, skidding into the Jersey wall, then caroming back into traffic, where I was rear-ended by a truck before I spun to a stop on the shoulder. In that accident, my glasses flew off my face as I was bounced about like I was playing bumper-cars at an amusement park.

This time, as I rose to my feet, I felt a great bruise on my right shin and some other scrapes and scratches. But I was standing. And it looked like I’d walk away. Everyone was most concerned. They were staring at me as if I might be a ghost. You know the way people study you to make sure you’re here or not? They say that those who have been in car crashes won’t know the damage done to them until days later, once the body has registered all that it has endured. I’ve been injured plenty but I’ve never fallen down a set of stairs. Had I not been carrying that sink, I might have hurt myself badly. The next day I was limping but okay.

Now the new piano is installed. Mr. Hughes will be by soon to tune it and make final adjustments, which include the installation of a regulator to diminish the effects of humidity on the instrument. Jill is practicing once again, tuneful notes of children’s songs resounding through the house.

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A friend of mine who travels the world left me a phone message the other day to announce that he had been attacked by a shark and was now laid up in a Miami hospital. I’ve known John since college and, while he is inclined to exaggerate on occasion, this didn’t sound like a joke. So I phoned him. When it happened, he says, he was spear fishing with a friend off the coast of Cuba, specifically Guantanamo Bay. After spearing one fish in particular and bagging it, blood clouding the water, he had a bad feeling about the sport. “We didn’t need the fish,” he said. “We had plenty to eat. It occurred to me that this was just bad ju-ju.”

A short while later, John decided to go ashore. He didn’t have his swim boots; otherwise he would have walked over the reef. Instead he had to take a longer route to shore and swim in. His friend decided to fish a bit more in deeper water. John was about 100 feet from shore when he felt a wave surge behind him. Then he felt great pain at the back of right calf. “Like someone slammed me with a baseball bat.” He turned around and saw that it was a bull shark, rocketing to the surface, yanking him up by the leg.

John did what any trapped animal does. He fought. He says he threw a fist at the shark’s snout. Apparently the shark released him after its unsuccessful snatch. Having bitten the bone of John’s leg and come away with nothing – John’s leg was still intact – the shark had to reconsider. Usually sharks have an easy time of a chosen meal. Had John’s leg been a parrot fish, there would have been no argument.

At this point, the water was red with John’s blood. He managed to clamber to a nearby reef rock that allowed him to get out of the water. He says he was aware of his great loss of blood. He tied off his wound as best he could. Then he flagged down his friend, who swam with John on his back until John could clamber through the sand. The shark was still cruising behind them, looking for an opportunity.

All the while, two American MPs were watching from their car on the shore road. When John and his friend asked them for help, the soldiers said, “Sir, we’re not allowed to leave our weapons.” John decided that he was a dead man. The soldiers would not put him in their car, which, John noted, was new. “Blood was everywhere,” he said. Eventually, an ambulance boat arrived and sped him across the bay to the military hospital, where surgeons sewed up his leg. Then a military plane flew him to Miami, where he has been for eight days.

I’ve never understood what John does for a living, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear that he was working as a subcontractor for the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, where he and others were digging up and exploding discarded ordnance (bombs) for the U.S. Army. “It’s not as dangerous as it sounds,” he asserts. “It’s really not dangerous at all. The money’s good and you get to work outside.” He says he trained for it about six months ago.

But now he’s in the belly of the bureaucratic beast, a hospital where he can hardly trust the nurses and doctors. “I’ve got to be an asshole to protect myself,” he says. “They’ll kill me if I’m not watching.” The other day a nurse was about to insert an IV line into his arm but the line was full of air bubbles. “You might want to purge your line before you plug me in,” John told the nurse. She did. This week, John phoned a friend who happens to be a surgeon. He told John to make sure they splint his injured leg; otherwise, his toes will curl under as his muscles atrophy and it will make rehab hell. John informed his doctor – “the kid is only 25” – and the doctor looked perturbed, as it was obvious John was getting advice. The doctor said he’d recommend a splint.

Today they told John he’d have to leave soon, since he is no longer in critical care. He’s missing some muscle in his calf but his ligaments are intact and he should be able to walk just fine. He thinks he can do his physical therapy on his own, as long as he can keep his wound from getting infected. “Dressing a wound is not rocket science,” he observes.

Interestingly, John seems to harbor no ill feelings towards the shark. Here’s what National Geographic has to say about the animal in question:

Bull sharks are aggressive, common, and usually live near high-population areas like tropical shorelines. They are not bothered by brackish and freshwater, and even venture far inland via rivers and tributaries.

Because of these characteristics, many experts consider bull sharks to be the most dangerous sharks in the world. Historically, they are joined by their more famous cousins, great whites and tiger sharks, as the three species most likely to attack humans.

I spent five months in the mid-Pacific last year and saw nary a shark. John admits that his attack is an outlandish happenstance. “What are the chances?” he says with cynical humor. “I see it as destiny.” To which I answer: “Apparently, you weren’t destined to die.” In states that have coastlines, you stand a far better chance of getting struck by lightning than bitten by a shark. But in Florida (remember, John was in Cuba), you stand a 20% better chance of getting attacked by a shark. Still, we’re talking long odds. Consider this: in 1996, nearly 200,000 people died from home-improvement injuries caused by nails, screws, tacks, and bolts. That same year, just 13 Americans died of shark attacks.

Still, give me a nail to the head any day. Nothing strikes more horror in my heart than the thought of being consumed by a beast many times my size. It’s a primordial fear, the fear of total obliteration. No body to bury or mourn over or pray for. Gone. That’s the terror of it, the vanishing, not the thought of being ground to fish food. We strive so hard to be present, to make ourselves a part of the world. That’s why we buy houses and fill our garages full of junk – we want to anchor ourselves to the here and now, to feel ourselves fully in the world. When one of us disappears, as a missing person or the irretrievable victim of an accident, the world seems out of kilter. Such a vanishing seems a diminisment of our collective humanity. It’s a threat to us all. If he can go, then I might be next.

But John is here and healing. It would be just his luck to be killed by an incompetent nurse, we joke. At the end of the day, what else is left us, but to joke and shake our heads in wonder at the smoking ground nearby, our ears still ringing, and say, “Damn, that was a close one!”

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