studio - behind the scenes
Salvador Dali would be pleased
I dissected a computer keyboard and discovered its beating heart is a flimsy sheet of plastic. My made-in-Canada Smith Corona typewriter, as old as I am, still working, stands solidly by.
grave goods
When a record album was in fact an album full of records, when records were shellac, when my mother was a teenager, when she was “Jody” – she made this old-fashioned playlist. What does it say about my mother’s preferences and choices and how her circumstances informed them? My latest long-playing writing project is to try and answer such questions.
Let’s call it something other than “not writing”
Lay aside the guilt. Sometimes words are not up to the work of expressing what is. Sometimes what is comes from that pre-language place. That pre-language place is where we came from and where we will go when we die. Let’s not think of it as a failing.
how not to write:part 2
Each day in Alice Vander Vennen’s Multi-Media Textile Assemblage class we received a gift…a stone, a leaf, permission to play… with which we started a piece, developed it, and took it to completion and presentation. What joy!
How not to write…
…it’s so easy!
- read the news, or even just the headlines
- overthink the point of social media
- choose a difficult topic to write about
- read a lot of books; call it research
- make copious notes; puzzle how to untangle them
- admire a vintage dress at the Costume House in need of repair; repair it
April is Poetry Month, but
where do the poems go
when life barrels
instead of meandering towards
Bang
Whimper
I sigh uninspired
and indifferent
(indifference - that ancient armour)
hiding from life
behind nothing at all
where are the poems?
in the ice edged puddles
in the ice splintered trees