Thank you, Alison.
And thanks to all of you for coming.
I'm going to read two stories this evening.
The first one is called "The Creative Fellow".
"I'm Bud Bach, a top historical regionalist.
In my bio, I call myself a Phoenix-based artist,
but based is putting it mildly.
I haven't left the city in years.
I've come to dread travel.
And now, humming down Interstate 10,
I feel folded up in fear, wrapped
like a leftover hotdog, an expression I can't get out
of my head.
It's what Quentin Richter, the very young art
critic of the Arizona Republic called me last year.
Tucson is only 100 miles, and I'm trying to stay calm.
Even in my cool Buick, the passing desert dries my throat.
I have to get down there to identify my brother's body,
and I need to find out exactly how Billy died.
I squeeze above Harper's knee, and his muscles
jump, filling my hand.
He won't be going with me to the morgue--
I'm too ashamed of Billy.
Just having Harper here, curled in the passenger seat,
is a comfort.
More than I deserve, because I'm going to ask him to move out,
and he doesn't know it yet.
He's brought me to a point at which I don't have any choice.
His expenses are sucking my mutual funds dry,
and I just had to refinance my house.
Suppose I couldn't pay the mortgage anymore.
But when I think about evicting Harper,
I think of how I treated my brother.
I've been remembering a night when I was young
and we shared a bed.
I lay awake, while Billy, huge and warm, squirming
with puberty, emanating a perfume of perspiration,
slept beside me.
The memory's ragged with turpentine, rubbed to a puddle,
but I can remember looking at him
and figuring out the life he'd have
and knowing I wouldn't save him.
I wasn't even going to try.
He used to have a groundskeeping business, but it went belly up.
At least it's long gone from the Tucson phone book.
And since, I never asked him.
Hoeing and pruning for someone else?
It's hard to imagine Billy holding any job at all.
He had a sour streak, a solitary one too.
Still, I always like to daydream of his finding
some home in the world.
Working as a fire lookout, that was easiest to picture.
Billy, alone atop a mountain.
Billy, snug in a moon-drenched cabin.
Billy, peering through binoculars
at miles of restful green.
I knew the contrast would be painful, maybe fatal,
so I never discussed my own career with him.
I imagined him turning purple if I
were to mention how the Kuwaiti royal family used
to love my desert scenes or which consultant once
chose my work to hang on the walls of how
many branches of what bank.
Twit critics will write whatever cruel things they want.
Quentin Richter called me the Botticelli of buffalo.
But I'm proud to my backbone of being
a top historical regionalist, and the market for my work
will still be there.
Galleries in Sedona and Scottsdale,
in Santa Fe and Salt Lake, used to line up
begging for my pieces.
Believe me, I know I'm not Picasso.
But if somebody wants a 4x6 of a buffalo brought down by wolves,
or needs a chief in a war bonnet to go
at the top of a staircase, nobody else
can do work like mine.
And thousands of people try.
And yes, it does torment me.
I'm old enough to admit it, that no one, critics,
or dealers, or public, ever knew how good I truly was.
I'm not painting as much anymore--
ideas don't come the way they used to--
but I'm still in another class from the hacks
you see in galleries today.
Vision?
Forget it.
Draftsmanship?
Some never even touch a brush, just
knife it on like peanut butter, in thick, aggressive smears.
Step back and view this, the dealers are always saying.
But you don't step back from a Bud Bach.
You only want to come closer, all the way in,
until you can hear the campfire's snap
and smell the freshly flayed hides."