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
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
The Black Art A woman who writes feels too much, those trances and portents! As if cycles and children and islands weren’t enough; as if mourners and gossips and vegetables were never enough. She thinks she can warm the stars. A writer is essentially a spy. Dear love, I am that girl. ~~– Anne Sexton Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Anne Sexton
“Deep inside, we are all so much the same — our details might be different, but we are all kind of walking the same internal path. And when I allow myself to be vulnerable, I am allowing myself to connect. I’m allowing people to connect to me.” — Dani Shapiro Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Dani Shapiro
It’s August. A month of heat, humidity, and irritable moodiness in the South. On top of that, the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is coming up and it’s all over the news, all over social media and just everywhere I turn. I am not looking forward to next week. I lived through it and I don’t want to relive it, thank you. I’ll leave it to the politicians and philosophers to “celebrate” how far we’ve come but I’ll be keeping my head down and looking forward to September. Here’s a little list of what I’ve been reading lately: Aubrey Hirsch humorously muses about … Continue reading Hot Reads 8.22.15
Because it’s the day of the week we need it most…. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.” ~ Joan Didion Continue reading Inspiration Monday: Joan Didion
Well, isn’t this fortuitous. A Twitter friend tweeted this Vimeo this morning so I, of course, had to watch immediately, fan girl that I am. It’s the first chapter of Lidia Yuknavitch’s new book, The Small Backs of Children, read by a group of writers and produced and created by Meg Tuite and Ken Robidoux for Crazy Rabbit Review on Connotation Press. It’s a great sampling of Lidia’s writing so get on over there and dig in. DOnt ya love it when you discover a writer that excites you? Continue reading Lidia on Vimeo
My WIT Month reading has gotten off to a shaky start. I was about a fourth of the way through Aimez – Vous Brahms when Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water (not a translated book) bookjacked me. Really. Once I began reading TCoW there was no looking back, there was no reading anything else, there was practically no other activity out of me other than reading that book. It all began with an essay I read in Guernica by Lidia which I wildly loved and propelled me to finally read this book, her memoir, which had been on … Continue reading I Was Bookjacked by Lidia Yuknavitch
