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Category Archives: Uncategorized

Everything goes here until I can figure out some what do do this that isn’t so confining.

On West Coast time

suits me very well. Never having been one of those people who can eat first thing in the morning, by the time I feel like it, it’s actually a reasonable time to be eating here (3 hours difference). Likewise, I’ve always felt quite alive in the night and have had a hard time settling down […]

Ayahuasca for writer’s block

I’m fascinated by Isabel Allende’s turning to ayahuasca to overcome writer’s block. Is this something you would do?
 ’It was the most intense, out-of-my-mind experience that I have ever had. It was very revealing and very important and opened up a lot of spaces inside me. But I don’t ever want to do it again.’
Isabel Allende […]

What I saw

The weekend scenery on a drive from Cincinnati to the SC Midlands and back, an abbreviated list:
Horizontal flashes of lightening, in a lightening storm that lasted through NC, maybe about an hour-and-a-half. The most impressive lightening storm in my life yet.
Flashing hazard lights emerging now and again through sheets of rain during the rest of […]

Or the patio in good weather

On one of my fascinations, Bob Hicok saying how it is for me.
I don’t think about “my” audience. It would be fun to have an audience. I’d keep it in the garage. I don’t know how anyone could write with a group of people in mind. It’s difficult enough to rummage around in my own […]

What we talk about when

Everybody and her brother has appropriated Raymond Carver’s words/title.[What We Talk About When We Talk About Love] But that is what happens after you write a book, a story, a poem, an anything — “once the writer offers the story or poem or essay or book to the world, his or her part of the […]

On being detail oriented in nature

Which is a funny phrase in and of itself.
An old journal entry. I wrote that an ex-mother-in-law once decried: “You notice everything!” and I felt bad about it. Yet it was/is a good thing to note on a resume “detail oriented.” As well, later my writing was praised for my “fine eye for detail.” Later […]

Running, writing, being driven

The project continues; it’s going to take some time, reading these journals accumulated from the past years. I had made a decision and an effort not to document or talk about my running in the notebooks, as I’d, after all, kept some other records when I was in training for, say, a particular race or […]

Bits of Tree of Smoke

Because it’s fresh on my mind, just having had with a friend a conversation about it — Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke — and because I seem to, it turns out, mention in passing something I’m reading without ever saying more — always meaning to, of course — always thinking I’ll come back to this […]

What’s right in the world

Woke up to icy rain, so we decided to delay our drive home (from Ann Arbor) until later hours when the ice pellets would become rain — after 10:00, said the weather report. Until just moments ago, then, the sound of C’s fingers on his keys: a few solid hours of work for him on […]

Love poem, Derek Walcott

Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your […]