A New Biography

 

This will accompany stories now, until further notice—

 

"Christie Cochrell is grateful for the several awards and Pushcart nominations given to her diverse array of published stories and creative nonfiction pieces, and for the favorite places far and near that have inspired her writing.  Chosen as New Mexico Young Poet of the Year while growing up in Santa Fe, she has more recently published a volume of collected poems, Contagious Magic.  She lives on the northern California coast in Santa Cruz, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe, and honors those who came before."

 

 

 

Image:  Santa Cruz Beach, with Author

Ocean and Black Dog, and Two Waters, Christie Cochrell

Out with Lanterns

 

It makes me so happy to see this long, rambling meditation finally published—and with photos I took (New Mexico, Oxford, Kew Gardens) nicely fitted in by Sybil, making it a true hybrid.  Prose, poetry, and images all mine, and me.  A kind of screenshot of who/where/why I am at this juncture.  Started towards the end of lockdown, when it was dawning on me how stir-crazy I'd become, after so many years of traveling more or less whenever I wanted, and having to worry that I'd never in my life get to travel again; and finished/edited as I was getting ready to travel again (yes, really!) to Santa Fe—time-travel back, for my 50th class reunion.  Getting ready to babble on about (in twenty words or less) what I'd been doing all that time, and where I have come out.

 

So here we are!  

 

The format kind of rambles too, which seems appropriate.

(And I learned after coming home that a Santa Fe friend named Sybil had just passed away—so a tribute of sorts, as well.)

 

One small excerpt from towards the end:

I am still sad, far from England and all the other far places I love, missing my life as Clarice Lispector describes it perfectly—

“I miss everything that marked my life. ... I miss 

the things I lived and the ones I let go. ... 

How many times I want to find I don't know what... 

I don't know where... To rescue something I don't 

know what it is or where I lost it.”

         But I have understood, putting the recent feeling of loss down in words, in the same notebook that now holds the little beach, the cardamom, the dogwalkers, the Sterling Silver “wishy-washy” ink I find today along with letters from Emily Dickinson translated charmingly into Italian, that I’m still me, enduringly, even at this remove.  Still weird as weird can be.  That the whorls of labyrinths, like fingerprints, are uniquely and indelibly mine.

 

 

Images:  On Museum Hill, Christie Cochrell

             Cycladic Figurines, The Ashmolean, Christie Cochrell

Salve Porta

 

The wonderful online journal, The Plentitudes, has again honored me by publishing a story in their Fall issue, “The Clarity”—this, all about doors and what they signified to Emmy Salas.

 

Doorways were fraught.  Portals to the unfathomable place where absence dwells.  The loneliest, most haunted spaces in the world.  They swallowed people whole.  Emmy had lived with a phobia of doors—entamaphobia—much of her life, having watched too many of her loved ones vanish through what Rilke in one of his Sonnets to Orpheus called “the inconsolable open door.”

 

Other elements in this story, “Salve Porta,” include Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins, Willa Cather’s novel The Professor’s House, Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, and a black Skye terrier, Pautiwa, named for one of the Hopi sky gods.

 

 

Images:

Aztec doorways, photographer unknown

Gates of Heaven, Bali, photographer unknown

Pisa light, Christie Cochrell