A friend's mother ate nothing but clams for six months. Morning, noon, and night, nothing but clams. 'I don't know what it is - I can't seem to get enough of them' she told her son. He shakes his head...
Drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you’ve destroyed what might have been a good painting, k...
The house had been torn down. Nothing is left but the old white fence. There used to be privet bushes everywhere. "The smell of privet is the smell of summer for me," I say to Catherine."Yes, Mom." sh...
I have decided that when I’m dead I’d like my body in the woods under a light coating of leaves. That being against the law, maybe I will go for cremation. I ask Chuck what he wants done with his rema...
It isn’t just the dying part; it’s the thought of the day coming when I will have already dead five, ten, two hundred years. All those centuries piling on top of me, like so many fallen trees. The fa...
Other people’s condiments are depressing.
If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny s...
Nothing is wasted when you are a writer. The stuff that doesn't work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way around. And if you're writing memoir yo...
I was in love with a poet. I'm in it for the pleasure, I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. I'm in it for the pain, he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where yo...
I used to lie in a lover's arms getting a stiff neck, or needing to scratch my nose, or losing all sensation in my arm, unwilling to move lest the man find out I wasn't comfortable in his embrace...Wo...
I used to get upset if somebody I didn't like loved a book I loved. That's MY book, I'd think.
I tried not to think of this as an omen, but unwelcome thoughts enter my head all the time.
It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your ow...
I have been trying to remember being young, which is hard because I don’t feel old until I try to get up from my chair. Or when I look at the photograph Jennifer took of me sitting on a stool next to...
I had always wanted to write but thought you needed a degree, or membership in a club nobody had asked me to join. I thought God had to touch you on the forehead, I thought you needed to have somethin...
I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two specie...
I can never make the same painting twice, not that I want to, I guess. Still, it would be nice to make a better version of something, or try it in different colors, but I never remember how I did it,...
I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting. I look the word up in the to find its earliest incarnation, but it has always been just ‘failure.’ There’s no Indo-European root meaning or...
Here’s what I love about painting. It’s not about words or voice or tone or point of view or narrative arc (perish the thought); it’s about the way certain branches stick straight out from the trunks...
Here’s what I love about dogs. They aren’t careful not to disturb you. They don’t overthink. They jump on the bed or the sofa or the chair and plop down. They come and they go. I’m not sure they love...
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