Dear Sylvia, I read your book The Bell Jar when I was an angst-ridden teen. It made me feel less alone, less shunned, less ugly. It helped me realize there were others out there like me feeling like a dead end dirt road. I wrapped your words around me like a cloud of soft familiarality and the world’s edges felt less sharp. Some may not understand this but you do and that’s all that matters. Thank you. Continue reading Happy Birthday, Sylvia
“People working in the arts engage in street combat with The Fraud Police on a daily basis, because much of our work is new and not readily or conventionally categorized. When you’re an artist, nobody ever tells you or hits you with the magic wand of legitimacy. You have to hit your own head with your own handmade wand. And you feel stupid doing it. There’s no “correct path” to becoming a real artist. You might think you’ll gain legitimacy by going to university, getting published, getting signed to a record label. But it’s all bullshit, and it’s all in … Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Amanda Palmer
The deep summer green has faded overnight from the trees, the season is already changing. As the twilights begin to shorten I also want to not be out, exposed, a cracked and worn Spode plate from a set mostly broken or chipped. ***** Found poem from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Continue reading My New Fragility
I needed a pencil for underlining. Finally found one way in the back of the pantry on the bottom shelf in a cup of pens. One lonely pencil. “Hilton Riverside” written down the length of it. It must have been from the tIme in the ’90’s when we evacuated there for a hurricane. I remember the wind was blowing the rain horizontally when we took the dogs out to pee and I had to lean into it to stay upright. I’d never seen that before. I had the best cup of coffee of my life the next morning when it … Continue reading A Lesson from “M Train”: Connections
“Writing is hard for every last one of us… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” — Cheryl Strayed Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Cheryl Strayed
So I had really planned to have a good dozen links to a good dozen poems and stories for this post, but then, life happened. I’m flexible, though, and decided to go with what I have because the two flash fictions, one video-poem, and one text poem here are dynamite. You just can’t get any better than these. So, forthwith: “Hands” by Tara Isabel Zambrano in The Sonder Review and Fictionaut. “I stay up all night. I write. I give up cashews and pistachios. I spend my time looking at his things wishing they were gone too. My only sliver of comfort about … Continue reading Hot Reads & Other Things
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves. — Adrienne Rich Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Adrienne Rich
