Athletic Writing
Writing Inspiration comes this week from Arundhati Roy as interviewed by Amitava Kumar for Guernica Magazine. I admire so much of what she says about writing, politics, the relation between the two…
Apology to Dancing Parrots
Yesterday, I wrote a poem, “Thanks for the Feathers,” around some bird metaphors, and I used the parrot to embody some of my self-doubt about what I’ve written over the last month. “I mostly fear the parrot, preening her witty feathers, nodding her cocky head to the songs of others.” That was before I saw [...]
A New Constellation
The NaPoWriMo prompt at Read Write Poem asked us to open a few different poetry books, choose some lines and work them into a poem. I selected lines ( in italics) from the works of Mary Oliver, Rainier Maria Rilke, Pablo Neruda, Paulann Petersen, and Sharon Olds (more detailed citations below). This piece is also [...]
Happy Feet
I’ve been writing and rewriting a manuscript on Nepal for at least ten years and am ready to be done with it, but I’m not. I have to dig in and do some really hard work revising pieces that grew stale for me a long time ago. I’ve been over the same material many times [...]
Making Bread
For many years, I followed Laurel’s Kitchen to make bread. I loved most of her recipes and her ethic of wholesome, healthy food. But her methods for bread stumped me. I kneaded and kneaded and kneaded some more and still ended up with bread that never rose well, tasted like cardboard – that is [...]
Bringing in the Wild
Saccharomyces cerevisiae strain. Photo: Maxim Zakhartsev I need inspiration to get back to my book. Last year during this time, I pulled out of winter hibernation and began a strong spurt of writing by bringing the wild indoors. I tempted my muses – various species of Saccharomyces – with some flour and pineapple juice. For [...]
To Blog or Not
After several weeks of dabbling here, I’m still torn over the twenty-first century quandary: to blog or not? “Why I Blog,” an essay by Andrew Sullivan, senior editor of Atlantic Monthly, has helped put the practice in perspective and inspired me to continue exploring. Sullivan considers historical cousins to the weblog: the ship’s log, diary [...]
