While the flu had hold of me, I couldn’t remember the names of things. It was like my brain had just stopped dealing with minor details as it re-ordered itself. That frightened my daughter who began to ask for instructions on paying bills. I took naps.
In the week between Christmas and New Years I had Plans. I reviewed my 2022 calendar and made notes in the one for 2023. January 2022 had virtually no notes at all except for little To Do lists for a one-week writing retreat I took at an artists foundation outside of town. It was only about 10 miles away but farther than I had been in two years and a nice way to remind myself that I might have chosen not to travel but I could still write. So, I decided in 2023 I would kick up my game and actually finish the complete draft. Finish it enough to send it to an editor by the end of the month. Starting Monday, January 2.
It is said that when Druids were in training they would spend hours at a time in stone beehive huts, utterly in the dark, so as to be able to memorize the enormous body of knowledge their culture held. Nothing was written down.
Show’s over, folks. And didn’t October do
A bang-up job? ….
Maggie Dietz, “November,” in That Kind of Happy (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)
“Haint” is an Appalachian world for a spirit, a ghost, a haunt. My mother saw one once. This is about when I heard one.
Trying to understand the 12th century from the vantage point of the 21st is like trying to imagine the life of one of those organisms in the depth of the ocean. We can’t do it. Too much has been lost.
This image is the closest I could come to what I have in my imagination. I am not certain Zelie had colored pencils. In any case, I have never seen any. She will acquire other supplies as the story goes on but at least this image suggests a young girl. And a question to keep in mind throughout the story: is she the main character?
Once upon a time …. I found a story.
I was working on a project (my doctoral dissertation) where I had to show that what I said was True. I had to have Documentation. And Footnotes.
But I couldn’t prove that my story was true, I just knew that it was, or at least that it could have happened in that way.
Each day, the autumn, eating a little further
into the bone. …
Poem Kerry Hardie. Image by Dede Hatch
At the end of The Audiobook, I invited listeners to “take the time to listen,” partly because Mark (co-author of Seeking Quan Am) had said, “If one talks too much about the good times, people perceive a candidate for the VFW. The one that pours out all the horrors is seen as a basket case. Try to balance it out and tell the truth, people haven’t time to listen.”
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