While making resolutions can be inspiring and enlivening, this year I seem to be interested in the opposite. Instead of resolving, dissolving. Opening to possibilities that I’m only dimly aware of, if at all. I don’t want to be constrained … Continue reading
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Language can eclipse reality. The names we give things are useful as labels, but they also generalize and standardize till we no longer see the thing before us. Here is a horse, we think, and having identified it, we stop … Continue reading
Our experiences and our emotions can seem so complicated and contradictory as to be impossible to express. This is why writers, such as Li-Young Lee, turn to images. In a poem which starts, “No easy thing to bear, the weight of … Continue reading
“We’ll just have to sell him,” I remember my mother saying with finality. “It will be a long winter and I will be alone here with only these children to help me. Besides, he eats too much and we will … Continue reading
Cut Flowers Because I want the blooms to last,I scald the stemsof roses, hold an orange poppy to a matchuntil the milk burns in the flame.It’s an art they call conditioning.I crush the base of a chrysanthemum—the heads keep blooming, rootless,like the … Continue reading
English Flavors I love to lick English the way I licked the hardround licorice sticks the Belgian nuns gave me for sixgood conduct points on Sundays after mass. Love it when ‘plethora’, ‘indolence’, ‘damask,’or my new word: ‘lasciviousness,’ stain my tongue,thicken … Continue reading
So often writers sacrifice their characters so that we, the readers, may experience a different outcome. In David Jauss’ story Glossolalia, the protagonist is consumed by regret. “Perhaps if I had said yes, we might have talked about that terrible … Continue reading
Have you ever wondered how many ways there are of saying Oh… The following poem give us an exquisite lesson on the subtleties of tone. OH As if she were to bump her shin in the night and utter a … Continue reading
Every move a cat makes is elegant, deliberate. The moments of awkwardness are so rare, and the cat appears so discomfited when they occur, that I have to laugh, unkind as it is. What if we as writers, in the … Continue reading