Writing Spaces

 

"What a blessing it is to love books."    (Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer)

"One benefit of summer was that each day we had more light to read by."    (Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle)

image:  Richard Emil Miller

Water Music

 

I'm immensely grateful to have had another short story accepted by our magnificent local publisher, Catamaran—this one called "Water Music," and evoking, variously, royal musicians and barges on the Thames, the coronation of Anne Boleyn, the Cheshire Cat, a Great Pyrenees dog, Tristan and Isolde, and a daring ship tattoo.  And, always, words and wordplay.

At-Home and Far-Away

 

Birdland Journal has published my strange non-fiction piece encapsulating these strange times, in their Summer 2020 issue, Writing in the Time of the Global Pandemic.

My piece, "At-Home and Far-Away," was conceived with Zoom and its little windows in mind.  Those of us who watch Zoom strictly for the opera choruses with each member at home somewhere likely have a different vision of it than those who use it to talk to just a couple of others.  To me, it seems a mosaic of dozens of little tiles from around the world—and my nonfiction piece is more or less the same, little vignettes from various places and years, here and elsewhere, fitting together however loosely as a mosaic of the last few months, the stories triggered by household objects enticing my thoughts far and wide.  

My research tells me that in Zoom terms it's "gallery" rather than mosaic, and not windows or tiles but participants or thumbnails.  But that's the idea, and my text would ideally be in three columns to more closely carry out the concept (if that didn't just distract from the sense of the language).

image:  David Wakely, Prayer Flags, Birdland Journal