Writing Spaces

"The act of writing itself is like an act of love.  There is contact.  There is exchange too.  We no longer know whether the words come out of the ink onto the page, or whether they emerge from the page itself where they were sleeping, the ink merely giving them color."

—Georges Rodenbach (Belgian poet), The Bells of Bruges

image:  Emanuel Phillips Fox, The Letter

Komorebi

I am pleased to have one of my short stories, "Komorebi," in the Summer issue of The Fourth River:  A Journal of Nature and Place-Based Writing.  This piece might have been written just for them, on both counts.  The place is rural Virginia, in the autumn, with nature all around and in the end a kind of spiritual salvation.  

The narrator counts her blessings at "being free to follow rambling little roads that led through places like Goose Creek, Crums Church, Pidgeon Hill, past taverns with hand-chalked menus and an 18^th-century gristmill on a slow green river, past pastures with dry-stone running walls enclosing leggy thoroughbreds or in one case a small white plane sitting wing-deep in overgrown grasses.  To stop at Willa Cather's birthplace in the Shenandoah Valley—her favorite author's cherished 'sleepy pine woods, slatey ground'—and then, late in the day, at some haunted Civil War battlefield.  To photograph the inestimable light in the Blue Ridge Mountains, then stay the night or week at country inns like this."


image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Henry Cowell Redwoods