Inside & Meanwhile
Prompt from last week’s workshop. Trying not to be too precious about this shit. To be a writer is to make some messy sentences.
How do you pray?
The leaves have opened completely outside my window, and my neighbor’s honeysuckle bush expands over my deck, a little more each year, though he leans over his deck and apologizes and trims it. The first summer we lived here I think I saw a hummingbird come drink from one of the small white flowers, and…
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These times are no more or less extraordinary than others.
I have been reading Annie Dillard’s ought-to-be-a-classic book For the Time Being very slowly. It’s a book that warrants the rereading of pages. There’s this one passage I’m totally stuck on. I’ve been reading it to everyone–in workshops, over the telephone. The passage calls me again and again. Here it is: There were no formerly…
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Ceremony & Song
A very beautiful, very dear friend of mine asked me to read a poem at her wedding–a poem of my own. She is an enormously special person to me. We have been present for one another in times of excruciating grief and joy. She is someone who I believe, having known her since she was…
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The Drive & The Conditions
Recently a friend said to me, “You were just talking about how writing is what matters most to you and now you have another book coming out! How lucky!” Um. But it’s not luck. But also…it’s not just Hard. Work. either. I mean, of course it’s hard work, it just is automatic in a lot of ways.…
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Good Reading Chairs
In the past year, I’ve noticed a certain insidious indecision creeping across my life (could be all the “who do you think you are?” I’ve faced at work) and I’m trying to unlearn it. I’ve been fuzzy on lots of things and more than a little depressed about the state of the world and I’ve…
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bad at the Internet
Friday night I came home from such a wonderful evening which was about a year in the making and checked my email and assumed that since I hadn’t received an email from Write Bloody I hadn’t won the contest. I saw something on-line, but didn’t investigate, because I was pretty disappointed. On Saturday I was early…
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Insisting Upon Delight
It was a crying-in-the-emergency-room/on-the-phone-with-the-pediatrician kind of week. And simultaneously, it was a friends & PBR on the balcony, snorting laughter, visiting babies on the couch, hike in the rain with people I love more all the time, and reading National Geographic aloud to my littlest homie. It all coexists, it is all simultaneous. It was also my…
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Changing Stories
The amazing Kate Gale ran workshops for us last week. She shared some poems she loves, read us some of her own incredible work and then challenged us to rewrite our own stories. Kate shared this incredible poem by Brynn Saito (linked here at Drunken Boat), and another poem by Saito. Kate’s prompt was about…
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