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| Photo credit: Red and the Peanut |
| http://redandthepeanut.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html |
Miss Howard looked at her watch. She had forty minutes. She walked purposely past the community garden in the park, a brave little project begun by young, eager do-gooders. There, the season’s beauty lingered. The giant sunflowers, seeded heads cocked, looked down at her, the asters screamed purple, the Heavenly Blue morning glories having scaled the chain link, preened in the pink morning light. A monarch fluttered past, bound for Mexico. The brash beauty of the golden maples and scarlet dogwoods demanded she stop, and admire. While poets were besotted with spring, Miss Howard found the fall to be most poignant season of all. Every year she saw more clearly the effort the natural world put forth-- the last, stubborn throes of bloom--before winter killed and cut. Every year the wistful earth seemed to draw her closer. She might bother with Mall Walkers and a dozen pills everyday--calcium, the vitamins, the fish oil, the Lipitor, the aspirin, the Celebrex—but one autumn soon, the beautiful, fatal earth was going to welcome Miss Howard. She would be ready.
Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.
...it’s in keeping with the religious and philosophical admonitions to “Be Here Now,” as the yogi Ram Dass titled his 1971 book. The phrase later became the title of a George Harrison song warning that “a mind that likes to wander ’round the corner is an unwise mind.”Or, to put it in the positive, a focused mind is wise and happy.
If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work. --Russell Banks
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| For the price of a Cappuccino, you can write in class, and share your in-class creations. |
*As noted in my previous post on great first lines:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
-- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.
--Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. - Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Grandmother didn't want to go to Florida.-- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984
They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The energy of the tree is beginning its retreat down into its core and roots to prepare for Winter's cold. All unnecessary energy is conserved and protected, and what is no longer useful is let go. It is a symbol of the beautiful process of transformation--of ongoing change.I think that's a lovely description of Autumn.
Fall is a time for examination, for letting go of what is burning our energy up unnecessarily. Metal, the element associated with Fall, is a symbol of detachment and dividing what is essential from what is not, so that we are purer in the end.
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| I'd like to thank the Academy... |
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| Among those attending the reception were David, Aurora and James, editors and publicists from Picador. |
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| Monarch stopping by. |
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| Moonvine slowly opens at 6 pm |
I'm reading it on my iPad...and generally...loving it.
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This year, we are partnering with the
The butterflies are migrating...I counted three tiger swallowtails, two black swallowtails, a monarch, and a painted lady. |
| They say the turtle makes progress only when she sticks her neck out. Figuratively speaking. I spotted this turtle on a walk the other day....moved her/him a few yards away to safety. |
Emma Hanley - Frances Conroy
I’ll never forget Frances Conroy's fascinating role as Ruth, the matriarch on HBO’s Six Feet Under. Both Frances and Emma, as it happens, are redheads and willowy and southern. Frances, born in Georgia, would capture Emma's soft lilt and steely kindness--and her unexpected chance for a late-in-life romance. She’d make Emma her own.
READ MORE including who will play Jake, Dora, Kyle, and Gordon. Oh, and also a suggestion for director.
Besides the first person, "I"--which everyone seems to start out with-- there's first person plural, "we," and second person, "you." And third person "close," where we have access to the thoughts of one character. Third person omniscient is what I'm most interested in exploring, especially because not enough writers use it. Or don't start using it early enough...it is a "mature writer's technique," as Richard Russo mentions in his fabulous essay, "in Defense of Omniscience."This kind of narrator:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." -- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“. . .many contemporary narratives are written in first person or in a third person that's a virtual stand-in for the first person. [In that case,] the third-person narrator has access to a single consciousness and rarely uses his or her status as narrator to offer up much that a single consciousness wouldn't provide. Your narrator need not be your protagonist. Or you, for that matter. Distance can, in some cases-for some stories-be a good thing. And even when distance isn't advisable, it can't hurt to consider options for the narrator-character relationship.” –Debra Spark
The next workshop starts August 23, with guest co-leader Robin Black. [Another brilliant woman and incredible writer.]How it works:
Workshops are six weeks in length and organized in a bulletin board format. Each week, three participants post their stories for review and commentary by Shannon and the group. In the final half of the workshop, they will be joined by a guest co-leader. Each participant will have the opportunity to have one story or chapter workshopped by our guest.
Cost: $375. Register by emailing Shannon. Register early: groups are limited to 9 participants.
He lives in Hawaii where is said to have cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants on a former pineapple plantation, "including the hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from extinction."Although raised in the Western tradition, he said he feels more affinity with an Eastern one, “being part of the universe and everything living.” With that exhilarating connection comes responsibility, however. “You don’t just exploit it and use it and throw it away any more than you would a member of your family,” he said. “You’re not separate from the frog in the pond or the cockroach in the kitchen.”
Merwin poem:
It made me think of the movie Being There. [It came out in the late 70's, but I watched it again the other night. It is not to be missed.]
New mown grass. Beer. Bread. Rotten eggs. Those seem to be a few of the "primary" smells you use to describe others smells.
Someone asked me if the garden is where I do my best thinking. I told her it’s where I do my best not thinking. Inspiration arrives unbidden. The seeds of ideas are sown. (Continue reading.)Pictured here from my garden: sunflower with smitten bee, sticky with pollen.
Everything is clumped and ready to unfurl, petaled and perfumed.
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April showers bring relief from pollen...and might finally uncover my [formerly blue] car and my [formerly black] porch. 
I bought Seahorses buy for a dime each a Myrtle Beach gift store, dried and hard, hundreds stacked in a bowl by the cash register like peanuts or chips. Now I was fluid and soft with feeling.
There were three of us and I was the smart one--like, if were were Charlie’s Angels-- I’d be Kate Jackson.
A story called “here’s your problem right here.” The repairman comes in and solves the leak quickly and the lady wishes it applied to other things in life.
Promise Keepers always hire me.
Now I found myself picking through all those facts she had casually tossed my way— a hodgepodge of confessions as cluttered as the jumble of cans in our kitchen pantry.
A week after Halloween, and the pumpkins are truly horrible. Moldy and soft, their sunken grins toothless and lopsided, their eyes slanted and uneven, unshaven, old-folks sunken, the ravages of time, the entropy, the true story they tell.
"It's a pity that you have such awful grandmothers," my mother told me, "and I had such interesting ones."
I was out to score some X because my husband was dying.
Take an afternoon walk downtown, veer off in one of the parks, and you’re likely to see some uncommon birds, resourceful mammals, and a few sly reptiles who manage to live and raise their young in a people-crowded territory. 
The leafy hardwoods in the North Main area are home to owls. Their hooting at night sounds like Vincent Price maniacal laughter and crazy lady screams. It makes me think of all the folklore about owls—as harbingers of death, predictors of storms, or as wise and powerful. They are magnificent. Last year, in the summer dusk, I happened to look up and see a very big one gaze down at me from a telephone pole on Bennett Street. The owl was cool and collected. Unflappable. Of course, he saw me first. I got the feeling he didn’t miss much.
The Eastern Bluebirds, who prefer meadows, nest in our front yard, in the house we put up just for them: facing east. I feed them live mealworms I keep in the refrigerator. The bluebirds raised two broods last summer. I watched the brilliant blue of the male bluebird—that sapphire wink—as he flew back and forth, feeding his mate—who was feeling peckish on the nest. Both of them worked their tail feathers off feeding their young. I’ve never seen parents work so hard. It was impressive. 
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