Ursula LeGuin wrote an amazing book called The Word for World is Forest back in 1972. A friend gave it to me sometime in the 80s and it has haunted me ever since. It’s something of an allegorical tale: humans head off to exploit the fictional planet Athshe—to kill the men, rape the women, and … Continue reading The Changing Dreamscape
Written with my Thursday Writing Group with the prompts: “59 miles,” she said, secret room filled with jasmine and. . ., never saying, this is going to be one of those days, she had that look in her eye, do, and you want to travel blind, light filtered through the trees, Linda, how to disappear … Continue reading Disappearing
Written with my Thursday writing group with the prompts: Charlie was a regular guy living a regular life, craving light, gibberish, his creative brain set in, his eyes looked, I’m surprised, cease and desist, aging is a choice, Buddha fingers and dragon fruit, we’ll make our own, and the world is full of lovely poems. I … Continue reading The Saga of Charlie and Mabel
Written with my Thursday Writing Group with the prompts: Silver spoon, marked safe, no desire to join them, it hurts, out the door, an old guy in a dark suit and red tie, “step over here, little lady,” I don’t belong here, hey--how did you get in here?, back to the times, traffic moved along, the … Continue reading Janet vs The Barbarians
Easter is very late and yet it snuck up on me this year. I seem to have left the Church and surprisingly, I don’t miss it. I often say to friends that if I’d intended to leave Catholicism for logical reasons, I would have done it decades ago. No, I left because I became too … Continue reading God of the Starling, God of the Murmuration
Prompts: Still a vigorous man, three doors where your life is headed, work clothes come off, modern attachments, the French was on the boards, ride my indoor bike, mosaics with flowers, part of the humor of everyday life Madelaine sat in a straight-backed chair, arranging the broken pieces of crockery into a pleasing design on … Continue reading The Humor of Everyday Life
In the beginning of The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, I found the book a bit off-putting. The author drops the reader into the middle of a scene with no hand holds or explanations. Our protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector in an unnamed city with lots of big buildings. But Whitehead doesn’t introduce us to … Continue reading Book Review: The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead
These are some pretty weird prompts, so please don't read more into it than there is. This is just for fun. Prompts: Jesus was an agnostic, Schrodinger’s cat is gone, two days he’d been waiting, Sweet William-my guitar, the serial killers Two days he’d been waiting, sitting on the front porch in a … Continue reading Schro and His Cat
About three quarters of the way through Tommy Orange’s There There, on the day of the culminating Big Oakland Pow Wow, it occurred to me that this plot structure was a bit like some potboilers I read way back in the 60s when I wanted to read grown-up books, so I borrowed a few of … Continue reading Book Review: There There by Tommy Orange
After the weight of holiday expectation has lifted, on short wet days when I don't feel compelled to rush out and toil in the garden or hike by the river, the light begins to return. Not to the sky, but to that small amber space between my belly and breasts. I discover again that I … Continue reading January
