As the whole world likely knows, the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, died at the age of ninety-one last week. I was royally hooked on everything written by Salinger when I was an impressionable teen. Franny and Zooey was my favorite…
Form not Formlessness
One of my resolutions for 2010 is to jump-start what I’ve taken to calling my solo MFA regimen. I know I have many gaps to fill, knowledge-wise…
Deconstructing Rejection
They’ve started to trickle in: the not-unexpected rejection letters from the dozen or so contests I entered a few months back, inevitably telling me that my poetry manuscript has not been selected for a prize or for publication
To Leap Is to Fly
I recently returned to writing poetry after years in the prose wilderness, writing short stories and the inevitable attempt-at-novel. While I’d never abandoned the reading poems—a love from way back when—in graduate school, my workshops and classes were focused around the craft of fiction. Oh, I waded into the…
The Wind in the Trees
It’s nearly the end of this windy Monday. I am listening to the wind pitch the camellia and rhododendron trees out front into the leaded glass window. This is not a trivial storm, the rain and eddies of wind are definitely mixing it up out there, like we are the bowl of eggs, waiting to be stirred, to be beat. Every now and then, too, the obligatory window-rattling sounds…
Keeping the Heart Open
I went to a writing weekend at Esalen in Big Sur, California back in October 2003. At the final session, all the attendees gathered together and we were all asked to reflect on these questions: What do I do to keep my heart open? How do I stay in touch with the source of compassion inside myself in these difficult times?…
Dew on the Grass
In March 2009, a dear friend chose to begin the process of dying “consciously.” What does that mean in this culture so notoriously youth-obsessed and morality-denying?…
Betwixt, Between
There were clouds upon waking but blue sky triumphant behind and around them. Then a wind that kicked up as I sat in my upstairs knotty pine room and tried, with some desperation and silliness, to concentrate on words. Afternoon was errands, a Ladybug coffee meet-up, and then back here to regroup.
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A Tao of Writing
In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called…
Hold These Truths
These days, when civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s…
