Although my niece, Shelby, wasn’t part of our family until she was eight, and my older girls were seven, I have been thinking — obsessively — about when they were all younger, and I thought I would share this poem. It was part of a collection (now abandoned) that I called Unbridled. I was experimenting […]
“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” -Victor Shklovsky
Yesterday, feeling unable to write, I enlisted the girls in a major decluttering attack on our playroom. The result was that I carried several boxes of detritus out to my writing cabin, and made a huge mess. That’s okay. Today I’ll work on that. Here’s a quote I found in Barbara Abercrombie’s A Year of […]
Yesterday our family was shattered by the news of the death of my niece, who was about the same age as my older daughters. Last night, feeling aimless and bereaved, I wandered out to my writing cabin and picked up Katherine Paterson’s book of essays, Gates of Excellence. She had this solace for me, and maybe for you, […]