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

 

Writing Spaces

“The Moving Finger writes, 
and having writ, Moves on,” 

as Omar Khayyam tells us in his Rubaiyat.

I am thinking about erasures, about writing by weather and by time that can be read as a long cautionary tale, a poetry of loss.

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Up Near Hadrian's Wall 

Stories I Thought I'd Written

Stories I thought I'd written

have instead 

written themselves in me,
into the sinew of my arms, my hands.

The way pine branches
writhe unmovingly
like Laocoön riddled by serpents,
within the lissome grace of needle-sprays.

The way oxbow rivers
reveal their agonizing course
through the bedrock
as if in motion fluid as water,

meeting resistence
as they find themselves 
again and then again returning 
where they started out.

March 17, 2018

(Writing towards Healing)

image:  Christie B. Cochrell, Sepia Pine

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