Writing Spaces

I added this Tiffany window, River of Life, to a short story yesterday—set it on the wide adobe windowsill of a crumbling chapel in New Mexico, to catch the light.

Studio with Mimosa

Another post in The Ekphrastic Review, this a small bit on Bonnard's luminous conflagration Studio with Mimosa, from my still unpublished novel Nude Against the Light.

We got to see this painting again in London in March, at the Tate exhibition of Bonnard's work, and I had the awful impression that it has faded since I saw it first in France in 2000.  I hope I'm wrong, that it was a trick of the light.


image:  Pierre Bonnard, 1935

Writing Spaces

image:  Typist of the World!

The Accountant

"Once upon a time (though he couldn't have said which, anymore) there was an accountant, much like any accountant anywhere, from the days of the ancient Chinese with their beaded abacuses and nimble fingers to the futuristic post-modern age where sleek uninteresting machines take care of all those numbers for you."

To continue, see Twist in Time, Issue 3, just published.





image:  Ancient Origins

Bonnard in the Alps

A long-ago journey as if taken again, with the publication by The Ekphrastic Review of my creative non-fiction piece on Bonnard's vibrant altarpiece in a church near Mont Blanc, high on a mountainside of fruit trees and geraniums and old stone.



image:  Pierre Bonnard, Saint Francis de Sales

Writing Spaces

Light—still what I'm all about.

I agree, as always, with Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, when she writes "But I also say this:  that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness, when it's done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive."

And like a toss of the dice, I come upon this reference to light and happiness (these in Venice) when I query my own writing:  "The bell to welcome the morning, tolling on and on again at first light.  Glass beads, like a rosary of quiet pleasures."

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Writing Room with Sunlight

Blue Monkeys, and an Octopus

Many of my favorite novels were serialized—

The Count of Monte Cristo, The Woman in White, The Portrait of a Lady, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Tender is the Night, and (by my namesake, that other Christie) And Then There Were None.

So it amuses me that my own endlessly long novel, set mostly in Crete, has been appearing in pieces, if out of order, in various publications.

"Blue Monkeys" was published by UK-based Belle Ombre in March (one Sunday morning as we sat on Hampstead Heath looking out at the distant London skyline and, closer, at fine dogs and their dogwalkers).  "Octopus" was published by New York-based Lowestoft Chronicle earlier in March. 

Both these feature Anna Oliver, a feisty 80, who all her life has done her damnedest to forget her Greek lover killed shortly after the German invasion in 1941, and to ignore the house he left her on the northern coast of Crete.

Another piece of Anna's story, "Naxos," will be published by Sweden-based Mediterranean Poetry.  For a taste of that, while waiting— 

"Anna laid a tart green against an impish red against a blue to knock the socks off you.  Saturated colors, wet on her fattest camelhair brush.  Painting caïques in the cove, on Naxos, sitting on a borrowed stool under a giddy great golf umbrella Marcella had also wheedled out of the hotel owner for her, with Metaxa written all across it, using the handy beechwood folding easel she had ordered specially for her Greek Adventure."

In the end I shall perhaps gather up all the pieces and tape them back together in whatever configuration they've landed, something fresh and surprising. 

image:  Blue Monkey Fresco, Palace of Knossos

She Who Hesitates

I'm pleased to have had my story She Who Hesitates published in The Wild Word, as part of their "It's a kind of magic" issue, Spring 2019.

This particular kind of magic takes place in Tuscany, in Montecatini Terme and Montecatini Alto.


image:  The Wild Word banner