Entering the new year, always sight unseen, trusting the words to come that will give voice to it—we're like these blindfolded students of the typewriter in older years.
image: Verso, Women Typists
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Writing Spaces
Entering the new year, always sight unseen, trusting the words to come that will give voice to it—we're like these blindfolded students of the typewriter in older years.
image: Verso, Women Typists
Year-end Vignettes
At the end of another December, in quite a different part of the world, she would come across ephemera from those days on the island over the years which she had pressed into notebooks like flowers into heavy dictionaries—pua—plumeria or frangipani, the deep purple orchids fished out of maitais, tucked behind an ear.
A church with a rusty steeple of corrugated tin.
Champagne corks and Chinese fireworks shot off into the ocean.
The parrot that said only "help" and "don't." "Help me."
A flotilla of fishing boats that left the harbor at sunset to sail up the coast, with all their mast lines strung with colored lights.
The Christmas morning she woke smelling the smoke from the luau pit, the stones and wood they had buried together, left to get hot for the evening's feast. Their Chinese friend who strung seed pearls told her it was turkeys they were smoking, for the feast later that day.
The paper lanterns being hung in trees just before the green parrot came into the garden.
Walking along the beach to the hotel, now abandoned and ruinous, where she had stayed five or six years before and took her coffee out, mornings, to the black rocks of ruined temples fallen into mirror-still tidepools, to write and redefine herself and read a paperback of Robert Browning's poems. The image of an empty hotel (and that one, hers, particularly) was eerie and unsettling—maybe because so contradictory.
—Christie
Monday, December 24, 2018
Writing Spaces
Floors are expressive of the feet that have walked on them (this, as I remember, first by medieval pilgrims); tiles, of the hands that made or painted them. Stories are in their earthy fabric.
I have considered shrines, spaces where objects sacred to one's being are gathered. One such I've written down includes terracotta tile, like these; a copper bowl, in which could be laid spices (saffron, indigo, turmeric, sage) or sensha teas; an antique Persian rug in the colors of dusty jewels; sheep bells; and a Pippi Longstocking chest, into which can go little rolls of poetry in several languages, buttons, shells, glass marbles, Portuguese stamps, and pressed flowers.
My Christmas Eve shrine, my writer's space today, would be both that and this that follows, wordless and bright.
Saturday, December 8, 2018
Writing Spaces
I've written these glorious photos into a recent short story.
"She found amazing photographs by a Romanian artist of the soft wooden inside of a cello, with light scrolling in through the sound holes. They made her feel that curling up inside one of the old deep-voiced string instruments would be the one safe place to be."
I am pleased to announce the following publications since last I posted:
The Small Warmth
Birdland Journal, Fall 2018
https://www.birdlandjournal.com/journal-issues/fall-2018/the-small-warmth-by-christie-cochrell/
Amandier en fleurs
Birdland Journal, Fall 2018
https://www.birdlandjournal.com/journal-issues/fall-2018/amandier-en-fleurs-by-christie-cochrell/
Fly Casting
Gravel, May 2018
https://www.gravelmag.com/christie-cochrell.html
The Memory of Water
New Mexico Review, May 2018
http://nmreview.nmhu.edu/the-memory-of-water/
Olema
Birdland Journal, Spring 2018
https://www.birdlandjournal.com/journal-issues/spring-2018-issue/olema-by-christie-b-cochrell/
Spring Fever
Figroot Press, Dec 2017
http://figrootpress.com/2017/12/10/spring-fever-marriage-by-christie-b-cochrell/
Marriage
Figroot Press, Dec 2017
http://figrootpress.com/2017/12/10/spring-fever-marriage-by-christie-b-cochrell/
Writing Spaces
This year, almost all writing spaces have been by the sea.
image: Maurice Denis, Sul balcone al Silencio
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