#345/365 Paintings

Verna Wilder. Excerpted from the story “The Girl Who Came Back”

I’d known from the time I was six that someday I was going to hightail it out of that piss-poor excuse of a family, and I was never coming back, even if my daddy got down on his overall-covered knees and begged, I’d be gone, dancing on a stage in Cincinnati, fishing a stream in Colorado, walking up a steep San Francisco hill in high-heeled shoes and a red dress, so full of myself that people couldn’t bear to look me in the face for fear they’d give up their puny-assed jobs and follow me wherever I led them.

…………………..

Verna is a writer who knows how to have fun. She wields words like an Italian pasta chef spins and tosses noodles. I had the pleasure of being in her writing group in Boulder Colorado for a time. It was SO energizing and fun. It was Verna’s buzzing creativity and laughter that could transform your day into a dusty memory. Lovely and gifted.

#344/365 Paintings

WM Rine. From novel-in-progress, A Place in Between.

An Aria for the Wind

I try to picture what this town was like when it was bustling, before the blocks downtown were full of vacant storefronts and empty lots. Like the Eagles Aerie, they say it was an opera house when they built it a hundred years ago. I wonder if anyone here has even heard an opera. I imagine a singer, a soprano, out in the middle of an unplowed field of tall prairie grass that’s rolling in great waves, and she’s belting out an aria, right into the face of the north wind, daring it to blow her away.

WM Rine is a frequent commenter here. He’s been such a support and delight all year long. He’s helped me seed several children’s books from this project. And his writing just slays me. Bonus. We share a love for authors, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, and likely Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo. And for the history of the prairie-lands where our bloodlines had their stories. I wanted to bring out a bit of that landscape here. I am thrilled that WM is writing this novel. I will not walk but run to buy it when it comes out.

You can find him at North by Southwest.

#342/365 Paintings

Cheryl Strayed. Dear Sugar

I’m reading “tiny beautiful things” and I can’t put it down. Here’s my favorite first page quote on forgiveness + favorite sentence in the first ‘dear sugar’ letter.

ON FORGIVENESS

“Forgiveness doesn’t just sit there like a pretty boy in a bar.”

……..

I dunno. When I see a pretty boy in a bar I start forgiving him straight away. Especially if he’s Jeff Bridges.

……..

ON LOVE:

Love can be romantic, platonic, familial, fleeting, everlasting, conditional, unconditional, imbued with sorrow, stoked by sex, sullied by abuse, amplified by kindness, twisted by betrayal, deepened by time, darkened by difficulty, leavened by generosity, nourished by humor, and “loaded with promises and commitments” that we may or may not want or keep.

~ Sugar to Johnny, tiny beautiful things. Cheryl Strayed.

……..

YUP

……..

See you on Monday with the launch of a new series of solicited prose from writers I love and admire. I already wish I had 3 months for this theme. ; ) 

#341/365 Paintings

The gem of a poem was one of the gems I received this summer after meeting a new friend in San Francisco. Sherry Belul. Lucky me.

For the Interim Time – John O’Donohue

When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,
No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come.
In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems to believe the relief of darkness.You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.”The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born.”You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

from: “To Bless the Space Between Us” by John O’Donohue. Pub in 2008 by Doubleday.