Summer will grow old

September 15, 2006

Pick a line from this poem,published in The New YorkerSeptember 18, 2006, to useas a prompt. I like:Summer will grow old . . .It is growing old. What does that mean to you? A Pasture Poem This upstart thistleIs young and touchy; it isAll barb and bristle, Threatening to wieldIts green, jagged armamentAgainst the whole […]

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A Prompt A Day

September 15, 2006

I’m going to try to do it: Post a prompt a day. Don’t know if I’ll succeed. I’m not good at maintaining routines,or sysems. I do finally have a place for the keys. Most days I findthem there. My eyeglasses? No way. Prompt:Write about a routine or a ritual.

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Hot Cicadas

August 4, 2006

“At eight of a hot morning, the cicada speaks his first piece. He says of the world: heat. At eleven of the same day, still singing, he has not changed his note but has enlarged his theme. He says of the morning: love. In the sultry middle of the afternoon, when the sadness of love […]

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Rereading Great Books

July 29, 2006

In “Rereadings: Seventeen writers revisit books they love,” Anne Fadiman collects essays she commissioned while editor at The American Scholar. It’s a wonderful collection of essays about reading and life and changing perspective. As a teenager I read all of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and most of Thomas Mann. I’m now rereading “The Magic Mountain” and […]

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Naming–and writing about– the Forbidden

July 18, 2006

“When we are told that something is not to be spoken about, we understand this to mean that this something should not exist – should not, cannot, must no, does not exist. In that moment our reality and, consequently, our lives, are distorted; they become shameful and diminished. In some ways, we understand this to […]

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Nerves

July 8, 2006

OK. You may not be a tennis fan but anybody can be inspired by the French player, Amelie Mauresmo, who won Wimbledon today–beating Justine Henin-Hardenne in a three set battle. Mauresmo, 27, has for years been a “head case,” undone by nerves, erratic at key moments, defeatist. Today she prevailed and said in her acceptance […]

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Spend it all

June 29, 2006

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something […]

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And the day came

June 23, 2006

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.~Anais Nin All around me people are splitting into bloom–opening the way tight-layered peonies swell into soft pink balls. One woman I work with has fallen madly in love since we […]

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