What Scares Us

On his Facebook page, Nick Bantock, artist and author (best known for his Griffin and Sabine trilogy), posted this writing challenge:

"I understand that during these rough days, most folk just want to be cheered-up or distracted. But sometimes, in order to see any light, we first have to admit to (ourselves) what scares us. Not by wallowing in self-pity or destructively acting-out, but by ‘simply’ expressing our deeper fears in a creative form (much like Picasso, painting Guernica to let out his pain and rage). So, here’s a suggestion, a simple way of letting go:

Write a short poem (4 lines is an easy length) that sums up your undertow of anxiety. It can be literal, metaphysical, or two steps removed; whatever comes out, without judgement."

Here's my response:

Everything I love, behind a rigid pane—

unbreakable, spotted with last month's rain.  

All I can touch is this (all else watch pass),

the cold indifference of glass.

image:  https://hdwallpaperim.com/rain-water-drops-water-on-glass/

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

Writing Spaces

The writing of summer . . . 

(And here, as a taste, are some summer poems.)



image:  E. Phillips Fox

Writing Spaces

Thoughts on the wind . . . 

"Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw?  Well, what

tongue does the wind talk?  What nationality is a storm?  What country do rains come from?  What color is lightning?  Where does thunder go when it dies?"

—Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes

image:  Schedelsche Weltchronik - Kosmologie

Milk

My long short-story "Milk," set mostly in and nearby the Cathedral close in Durham, England, has just been published in Minerva Rising Issue 18:  Reinvention, Resolution, Recreation.  

Despite her utter lack of resolution and self-confidence, after her archaeologist boyfriend leaves her for a Roman archaeobiologist, Virginia takes the path of least resistance to weather through, then by way of her love of cooking and her caring nature reinvents herself and recreates her life.  Here's an excerpt from near the beginning:

“It’s no use crying over spilled milk,” he had often quoted his no-nonsense Aunt Hattie, never married, who’d moved back to Santa Fe into his childhood house to take care of Joey and his two older sisters after their parents’ death.  Joey had readily embraced Hattie's dictum, not being one to regret, to look back.  Odd for someone studying the ancient past, some might argue, but he saw archaeology and art history as forwards progress, a necessary advancement of knowledge for the good of humankind.

         Though she was one to regret anything and everything, Virginia would much rather not be crying over it in public—and especially not in the spice aisle at the mega-Safeway on El Camino over a tin of bay leaves, exactly like the one she’d bought to make jambalaya with sausages and red peppers and chicken thighs for Joey’s 40^th birthday.

Contagious Magic

It makes me happy to announce the publication of my book of poems, Contagious Magic:  Collected Poems.

"Always light-gathering, these poems move back and forth among the places that have been essential to the poet's life—New Mexico and the southwest, old Roman vestiges in northern Italy, a longtime home next to a synagogue in northern California, the color-drenched French countryside of artist Pierre Bonnard.  The magic of the title is carried by spices and pigments, water and birds, bright strings of turquoise and branches of pine.  As traveler, word-peddler, and celebrant of joie de vivre, the poet's quest has been to gather luminous ingredients wherever they are found."

Written over a large span of my life, and every so often published in journals, some of them, the poems were gathered with others and ordered differently for a Continuing Studies class at Stanford several years ago, then put back in a drawer.  When the threat of the Coronavirus came upon us in early March, I decided I wanted most of all to spend my hours (final if they should be) getting my favorite poems of the collection out into the world, as a kind of memoir.

My preface explains the title (timely, but coincidental):

James Frazer, British anthropologist and author 
of The Golden Bough, said that contagious magic 
has to do with the associations between things.  "Things that have been either in physical contact
or in spatial or temporal association with other 
things retain a connection after they are separated."  (Phillips Stevens, Jr., Skeptical Inquirer, Nov/Dec 2001) 

         The Hawaiian religion calls it aka, these bonds or shadow cords connecting us elsewhere, animating our being from however far away. 

         My life has been rich with resonances of this sort.  Thunder rumbling in purple canyons holding the ruins of Anasazi dwellings; the evening air holding the memory of temple bells.  Words carry magic.  For me, each poem is an incantation, a small spell marrying sage maybe to red ochre and chile pods,
 contagious in the sense of
passing on chance findings of quixotic joy, incendiary light.

Happy launching, little book.  Sail true.  Like the lyrics of Giuseppe Verdi's heartbreaking chorus, that speaks of the lovely, lost homeland, of times gone by that are dear and irrecoverable, in these perilous times, "Fly, my thoughts, on wings of gold."

Contagious Magic can be ordered from Barnes and Noble, Amazon (on Kindle too), from Bookshop Santa Cruz, or from your favorite local bookstore.