Supplementary material, photographs, outtakes, and commentary
Complex Beauty and Avenging Fire
It is a disjointed memory, attached to impressions. I was fourteen, traveling in France with my family. One day we planned to visit an eighteenth-century country house, I don’t know why. For the architecture, probably. I remember nothing of the tour apart from…
The Silly Holiday
I used to host retreats on what is popularly known as “Celtic Spirituality.” I was good at it, largely because I found the whole concept a relief from a particularly patriarchal and oppressive church experience I was caught in. I focused on the…
All The World’s A Stage
I have been wrong about almost everything having to do with politics, communal beliefs, and human nature for ten years. I thought at every turn corrective forces, based in values taught in children’s books and elementary school, would mean the demise and disappearance…
The World Turned Upside Down
I’m a reader and a writer. Like so many other readers and writers I love finding connections and themes. Even when I don’t like what I see I still look for meaning. So: today is January 6th, the traditional end of the joyful…
Drums Against the Dark
It was 1972. I was newly married, living in the north but traveling south for Christmas, which was a major festival in my family. Through a series of happy accidents, my husband had escaped any danger of being sent to Vietnam so my…
The Long Winter Solstice
In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia is under an enchantment that makes it “always winter and never Christmas,” meaning “always dark and never light,” “always cold and never warm,” “always dormant and never growing,” “always fearful and never hopeful,” “always…
In A Time of Violence
Most people I urge to write during this time dismiss the idea, or don’t register it as having any relevance to themselves. They aren’t “good enough,” they would say, or they aren’t “writers,”or their story isn’t interesting, or important, etc., etc. No matter…
Getting Through This
Over the years I have used this blog space to mess around—with ideas, kinds of writing, connections, seasonal musings. My categories have morphed over time and have held various kinds of writing in a loose organization that makes occasional sense. That changed on…
We’re going to need a bigger boat
We need a bigger boat now, because clearly the one we have been rowing is not adequate.
DNF (Did Not Finish)
Often on book-reading discussion boards someone will ask about DNF books. Do you have DNF books? What books are DNF for you? Is it even ethical, within the universe of book-reading morality, to DNF a book? Writing is difficult, sacrificial, even bloody, after…