Tagged: puttingwordstogether

I can’t imagine what I would do without words. Where would the poems go? Where would be the satisfaction of seeing my thoughts take shape before me in printed form, intangibles made solid and communicative? Into the sound of silence, the still and quiet spaces of speechlessness. How often do you stop and think about the words you use every day to express yourself? How often do you ponder word choices and regard with amazement the fact that you HAVE choices about the way you say things, the words you pluck from your braincase and plug into place in the...

For book group tonight, we read Marlo Morgan’s controversial novel Mutant Message Down Under. I have to say, that though parts of it were valid and interesting, overall I didn’t really like the book. It seemed implausible and simplistic in too many ways. We had a good discussion about the book, though those of us who sat mostly silent were the ones who obviously didn’t like it much, while those who talked a lot had apparently connected with it on a much different level. Anyway, the gist of the book is that a white American healthcare professional in her 50s...

Once in awhile I get an urge to either radically change my journal layout, shake up my flist/blogroll, purge things like crazy, even going so far as to entertain the idea of shelving the whole damn thing. Wipe it out. Start over, maybe. Most of the time that urge results in nothing so drastic. A new banner, instead. A perusal of my friends list and feeds which leads to 1 or 2 deletions and several almost-deletions before I pull back from the brink. I get the same urge in real life, as well. But because I am bound by family,...

I remember the night before a trip there was always this breathless feeling of excitement in the pit of my stomach. We usually went on car trips, my dad packing the big station wagon the evening before, laying out blankets in the back and putting all the baggage around the edges so that we had a place (when we were still kids and mandatory seatbelt laws were still to come) to stretch out or play. Sometimes we would get started early in the morning, before the sun was up and the world was quiet, the air still chill, and our...

Sometimes, especially when I’m in the middle of reading a book where the writing just blows me away, where every word seems so perfectly chosen and polished and dovetailed to a plumb with all the other words, in a way that I wouldn’t have thought to use it, in a way that is so fresh and so right that it nearly makes my hair stand on end, then I can’t imagine ever writing again myself. How could I? It’s not that I think that I have to write as perfectly as some of the writers I admire most, or even...