February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
Swim for your Life
There’s a scene in Wes Craven’s “Last House on the Left” in which a teenage girl, only just victimized in the worst imaginable ways, runs barefoot and half-naked through a thicket of woods. We run along with her and our hearts leap with hope as she launches herself off the rocky shore, head first, into a calm, denim-blue lake. We know she is a competitive swimmer, so we...
2 tags
Foregone Under Honey
That woman opened
Her mouth,
Foregone under honey,
and the rough Trading began.
Domiciling spelled permissible
grasped at felicity
Recast the girl and
Sated all the zone.
Until
An alliterative gradualism
Uncollected, shook water from ears
blistered with enterprise.
Dwight Okita's poem, to honor "Remembrance Day"
In Response to Executive Order 9066:
All Americans of Japanese Descent Must Report to Relocation Centers
Dear Sirs: Of course I’ll come. I’ve packed my galoshes and three packets of tomato seeds. Denise calls them love apples. My father says where we’re going they won’t grow.
I am a fourteen-year-old girl with bad spelling and a messy room. If it helps any, I will tell...
“Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been...”
– Joan Didion, in her 1976 New York Times article, “Why I Write,” (full PDF), which begins: “Of course I stole the title from this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write… I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because...
2 tags
Best Case
It was always the waking up that surprised her. Not because she didn’t claim ownership over her own reckless behavior, but because she found that a little sleep, even forty minutes or so, produced just enough conscious distance that she was startled by the evidence around her. That evidence, usually in the form of vomit (or worse) on her clothes, or receipts, or other sundry items that made it...
January 2012
3 posts
I made NPR! (sort of) →
The Loft Literary Center is holding a 6 word memoir contest on Twitter to give away a free admission to my online writing course “Going in Sideways: Practical Strategies for Writing Memoirs” … and I get to be the judge! So fun! Check out my website to sign up for the course, too — It starts February 6th.
The next time I appear on NPR or the State of the Arts blog, it will...
“Life’s absurd. Live authentically. Stop whining.”
– Wally Lamb
6 tags
On Sleeping and Stravinsky's Wife
Stravinsky’s wife got the shaft. She tirelessly championed her husband and musical pioneer, watched as he spent almost twenty years living a double life with his mistress and eventual second wife, passed along her own tuberculosis to her daughter Ludmila, then witnessed said daughter die before she croaked herself. What a raw deal.
Up until now, I pitied myself a lot. Felt bad that...
December 2011
8 posts
“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your...”
– Margaret Atwood (via pavorst)
4 tags
Back to Bed
I didn’t taste the fruit cup on Christmas morning because I was too busy screwing up the rest of the meal. Turns out the oranges were piercingly tart.
I had it all planned the week before: caramel rolls and eggs benedict for Christmas morning. Then SOMEONE mentioned that caramel rolls were an X-mas tradition in another, previously married life. I, of course, instantly vowed never make...
5 tags
Writing for Your Life
I am working like a madwoman. My day job has become a night-and-day job, and though I love it, I’m exhausted. I told myself this would be temporary, this crazy schedule — that it was necessary to build my business and cast my net wide to connect with innovative people, but I am running out of juice.
My biggest problem isn’t the fatigue, though. The biggest problem is that...
“What I don’t write is as important as what I write.”
– Jamaica Kincaid (via pavorst)
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and...”
– Jack Kerouac (via pavorst)
“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”
– Jules Renard (via pavorst)
2 tags
How To Be a Published Writer →
I love the clarity of this piece. It relaxes me, somehow, and helps me to feel content with my personal “diligence”.
“Poverty’s child -
he starts to grind the rice,
and gazes at the moon.”
– Matsuo Basho (via moderateclimates)
November 2011
9 posts
4 tags
Upon Hearing Footsteps
The neighbors said he was crazy.
When I moved into this house, I knew that the previous owner lived out of state, and bought it for his father. He was selling it because the old man had gone into an assisted living facility. That’s what the realtor said, anyway. I also knew that he struggled to take care of the house, leaving it grimy and in certain disrepair.
And then I found the pillow. It...
Poet-Bashing Police →
As reported by professor and former poet laureate Robert Hass: Police officers face off with students and poets in Berkeley in the very spot where the Free Speech Movement started.
"Bigger Than They Appear" . . .Tiny Poems. Massive... →
Here’s how to get your hands on it …
“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (via aepocrypha)
8 tags
Art and Yoga
Tonight, as I lay in Savasana, I thought about something my teacher said:
“Yoga makes you a better observer.”
Earlier, she had noted the changing season and daylight saving time — that the studio would be dark before the end of class, and then the dreaded: “it may snow tonight.” I moaned a little with my sweaty forehead pressed to my kneecap, slightly annoyed by the distraction. She then...
How and Why to Write →
yeahwriters:
George Orwell
Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be...
8 tags
Previously Unpublished
This goes out to all the blogging writers, posting poetry and snippets of prose: You do realize that you won’t be able to submit this work for publication, correct?
Most publishers won’t consider works that are published on personal websites … which is why I’ve been removing work from this site, after enough time passes for me to not hate it so feverishly.
Don’t...
3 tags
A Brief, Humble Opinion Inspired by National Novel...
There is no such thing as the great American novel.
Earn respect when you:
wrest words, fashion text,
craft language.
Not because
you check a box,
or hop-skip-jump through hoops,
or lube the path to publication.
There is but one reason
and one only,
to write a novel:
Because
you cannot live
unless you do.
4 tags
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll...”
– Rumi
October 2011
17 posts
1 tag
Mad Hot 60-Second Write
He looked so nervous just standing there that I put down whatever I was holding to embrace him. I was not used to reaching up so high. It was the second time I touched him.
The air outside was so cold, it slapped the back of my throat when I inhaled. He said he would drive backwards all the way to Duluth with me.
“To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be...”
– Pablo Picasso
“To go inside yourself and to encounter no one for hours—this you will have to be...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Mark Harman (via proustitute)
“Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, inhale, exhale, release life’s...”
– Vladimir Nabokov. (via sheakespeare)
4 tags
Thursday in the Stationwagon
I’m sorry for saying I didn’t like it
It’s OK
I’m sorry if I made you feel bad about it
You didn’t
I was just jealous of the others
Really?
Yes. The Mike Lewis one, mostly.
Really?
Yes.
No.
I want you to be honest with me
Then that’s the one I’m jealous of.
OK.
I want my head to be heavy, too
But I know now that there’s different kinds of heavy
That’s true
Different styles can both be heavy
I want...
2 tags
Thirtysomething Rumination: Playing Grown Up
The twentysomethings are usually slightly adorable to me, but sometimes I just want to shake them. And, yes, I once was a twentysomething. I recognize that, and I am grateful to the sum of time and tragedy that allows me to reflect fondly, albeit with a certain degree of shame and horror, on those years.
These budding adults, the twentysomethings, fixate on alcohol. They seem to find it...
2 tags
3 tags
1 tag
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
– Ray Bradbury
5 tags
Writers Guild East Joins Occupy Wall Street March →
utnereader:
(via Galleycat)
The Writers Guild of America East will join scores of other unions and community groups in a demonstration today. Do you think more writers should join this growing movement?
Margaret Atwood on self-expression via social... →
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap...”
– Steve Jobs
Watch…first attempt at digital storytelling. Many thanks to Candance Doerr-Stevens of the Minnesota Writing Project…
September 2011
4 posts
The Poet
by Tom Wayman
Loses his position on worksheet or page in textbook May speak much but makes little sense Cannot give clear verbal instructions Does not understand what he reads Does not understand what he hears Cannot handle “yes-no” questions
Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc. Cannot tell a story from a picture Cannot...
Mr. Pip, Master Mixologist. →
I’m counting on some stellar NA cocktails from him at Marvel. He’s a genius, and I can’t think too long about the Aviation and his Manhattans, or I get a little blue.
2 tags
Lost and Found
His first impulse was to remove her shoes.
Her left knee was scraped raw and her right ankle was folded underneath her rump at an odd angle.
The fingertips of her left hand rested lightly on her thigh as if she had casually reclined for an afternoon chat. But her eyes were closed. Her lipstick was smeared and her lips slightly parted, mostly because one flushed cheek pressed against the brick...
Ira Glass on Storytelling →
I should watch this every single day, commit it to memory, and speak it aloud to every artist I meet.