I’m taking another workshop through Tweetspeak Poetry called Writing Toward Joy and led by the incomparable Megan Willome. We are working our way through Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time by making florilegia–bouquets of sparkling text that we create out of sentences that jump out at us. We then try to see what new connections […]
First Words Friday: Week 6 – 2019 – Literary America
I bought this book–A Journey Through Literary America–as a gift to myself directly from the website, on sale and autographed. But it’s also available on Amazon. It’s “a literary pilgrimage in photography and prose.” Thomas Hummel (writer) and Tamra Dempsey (photographer) set out to find the stories and explore the places that inspired 26 of […]
First Words Friday: Week 5 – 2019 – Braiding Sweetgrass
I’m all about nature writing, especially when the words are woven as beautifully as they are in this book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Okay, so the last part of that title sounds… well, boring. Trust me, it’s not. Elizabeth Gilbert calls the book, “A […]
First Words Friday: Week 4 – 2019 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I have to stuff marked-up (red inked, blue inked, yellow highlighted, and penciled) page chunks back whenever I pick it up. I’ve loved well my Twentieth Anniversary paperback edition of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea with its bent and faded covers. It’s a “vintage book” with an original copyright of 1955, but her […]
First Words Friday: Week 3 – 2019 – Mary Oliver
The evening of January 17, 2018, I posted the above photo with this quote: “And mostly I’m grateful that I take this world so seriously.” ~Mary Oliver in “The Gift.” My Facebook and Instagram feeds are filled with Mary quotes. She inspired me to pay attention and to be astonished. When we moved to Florida, […]
First Words Friday – Week 2 – 2019
Last week I shared some first words from A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, a book on my to-read list. This week I’m sharing from one of my favorite books, one I’ve read and reread and occasionally slice through–An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. My word, that woman can write. From […]
Commit Poetry: Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Tweetspeak Poetry has formed a “By Heart” Community, and we are memorizing a poem each month. For December it was “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon. Having lived for years in the country and walked the roads in the evenings, I can see these images and hear the night sounds–though a chafing instead of a […]
First Words Friday: Week 1 – 2019
I just discovered a Twitter hashtag. I don’t know how long #FirstLineFriday has been around, but I think I’ve been missing out. In keeping with my new resolution goal plan to write here on a more regular basis, I’ve decided to add a category to the list of categories I’ve up until now not been […]
The Grenfell Fire, Friends, and Food
The fire started in the kitchen of flat 16 on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a 24-story block in west London. Ethiopian-born Behailu Kebede had lived there for almost 25 years. Just before 1 a.m. on June 14, 2017, his smoke alarm shrieked, and he discovered smoke coming from behind his refrigerator-freezer. He called the […]
Anna Akhmatova and Friends
When Anatoly Nayman recounts his first meeting with the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, he describes her gesture of hospitality. The woman who had let me into the flat brought in a saucer on which lay a lonely boiled carrot, which had been peeled perfunctorily and had already dried up somewhat. Perhaps such was her diet, perhaps it […]
