There is an art to this

There is an art to this. To waiting, to being present in uncertainty when moments are only whatever it is that they are until the next moments arrive. +++ Today writing terrifies me. It terrifies me because of the way these stories last, the way we tell ourselves stories in order to be who we [...]

A story chameleon

I slip among the cushions on the couch with a book and the edges of everything else grows blurry. Reality becomes the story on the page. I am no longer here, even as outside things are moist and green, and the lawn mower thrums loudly as T. cuts back and forth across the grass. In [...]

Before you knew what your life was like

Flipping through a book of poems by e.e. cummings I found flower petals by the dozens from a time in my life when love was a dreamy and girlish thing (embodied by the poem, above–one of my favorites.) I wanted to be loved the way e.e. loved his women in his poems. I understood little, [...]

hello, Monday

Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, [...]

What would you ask for?

“She’d been so sure a crap liquor store would not stock French cigarettes just because you asked. The shock every time she went in, and there they were. She was used to taking the world as it was, she’d never have guessed you could get what you wanted by asking for it.” ~from Paint It [...]

The New Yorker: "Love Affair with Secondaries" by Craig Raine

It’s about adultery and cancer. Two things that seem kind of overdone especially when combined without beauty in the same story, which is how I felt this story combined them. I wanted to like it, I really did, especially since DH said the story sucked and I wanted to have some sort of cool-kid take [...]

Flexing my reading muscle.

In college I had a writing teacher who made me type out stories I thought were good. Every sentence. Every slender comma, ellipses, period, paragraph, dialogue, description. She said it would help me to get inside the craft of the story. That I would begin to hear in my head the author’s internal dialogue; that [...]

Lists, naps, and a month of living 'perfectly'

I wake up from dreaming of the Arizona desert and a professor and his wife I don’t actually know in real life. The phrase “sand frills” sticks in my mind, something I’ve invented in sleep: as in, the canons and mesas give way to sand frills. It almost works to describe the way the sand [...]