February 2012
6 posts
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wringing
“We write about what we don’t know about what we know. – Grace Paley
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The five stages of running
An hour before running: I don't wanna run today.
5 minutes before running: I'm pumped! Let's do this!
While running: Can't breathe... must...keep...going...run to the rhythm of my music...don't...die...
5 minutes after running: Everything's awesome! I love running! I could run for the rest of my life!
An hour after running: I. Am going. To die.
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Go big or go home, right?
I registered for my first full marathon yesterday, the Bizz Johnson trail marathon near Lassen in October. I’d say I’m not sure I can do it, that what an achievement it’ll be if I do and all that jazz, but the truth is, I’m a paper girl. Show me the training schedule that will get me there and I’ll follow it religiously, and I’ll get there, just like I did with...
Oh, there's fire.
There is so much fire.
January 2012
9 posts
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“I have always had to tell myself the story of myself in order to sense a self at all.” – Nancy Mairs
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night running*
Tonight I tempted fate and went for a frosty sunset run. A couple of laps around the marina, a little over three and a half miles, after almost everyone else had gone home. It was 30 degrees when I started, 28 when I finished, cold enough to be breathing fog, and by then the stars had started to come out. It was beautiful. And it felt so damn good after spending the last week going stir crazy,...
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dreams in a snowless winter
We’re in a camper, a small one, with a wood stove going, talking about where we’ll go but remembering that we would have to go find our dish towel, which was lazing outside somewhere, and bring it upstairs to the apartment first. And then suddenly I’m laying on my stomach in the frosty grass in the middle of the night, taking pictures of the Milky Way that’s rising out of...
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“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
— Franz Kafka
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Poetry Sundays
Every Sunday some writer friends and I get together and each build a poem around a chosen word or theme, literal or figurative, stated or suggested. It’s good for the arty muscles. And to dig out those things that tend to collect deep down. This week’s word was: brittle.
~.~
but we are breaking as against the shore of a place we have mapped and portended but never set foot on too...
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December 2011
10 posts
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Stella? Stella . . . ?
I’ve been having trouble getting back into the groove of regular writing. I was so habituated to squeezing small bits of it between classes and related projects and other obligations for most of the year that now, even with the generous spread of time I’ve got for the next several weeks, I can’t seem to get beyond more than a hundred or two words at a time before I dead-end. So...
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*
A year of running at least three times a week, and it’s at the point now that non-running days feel off. I get a line down on a story, maybe two or three, but am restless and can’t stop shifting around. I get up out of my chair, walk around, look out the window, listen at the door for what’s going on downstairs, wrestle the cats. Or even just to stand, get up on my toes. Try a...
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Poetry Sundays
Every Sunday some writer friends and I get together and each build a poem around a chosen word or theme, literal or figurative, stated or suggested. It’s good for the arty muscles. And to dig out those things that tend to collect deep down. This week’s word was: etiolate.
~.~
the etymology of a thing, its bare root, a genesis saccharum, saccharon, sarkara, saccharine ...
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listen
There is no human emotion more raw and affecting and inexpressible by almost any other means than what happens at minute 4:02 in Pearl Jam’s Black. Or at minute 2:52 in Sade’s Pearls. Or at minute 5:17 in Sigur Rós’s Untitled #3.
November 2011
4 posts
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Poetry Sundays
Every Sunday some writer friends and I get together and each build a poem around a chosen word or theme, literal or figurative, stated or suggested. It’s good for the arty muscles. And to dig out those things that tend to collect deep down. This week’s word was: spasmodic.
~.~
catch
if you say / say now / we have come from a place where words / no, more guttural than this / ...
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Poetry Sundays
Every Sunday some writer friends and I get together and each build a poem around a chosen word or theme, literal or figurative, stated or suggested. It’s good for the arty muscles. And to dig out those things that tend to collect deep down. This week’s word was: occlude.
~.~
I take a swipe at your tight face pull it back, brush it off you were 24, then your bright smile dark your...
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*
Thinking of renaming this place Writing + Running, since that’s all I seem to do anymore. I’m not complaining. Hopefully Murakami won’t sue.
October 2011
2 posts
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September 2011
2 posts
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yes
“I think for me being in the writerhead is like going outside to see if it’s started to rain yet, and it hasn’t quite started, and you can just barely sense those first scant drops, so light you almost wonder if you’re imagining it, but you know if you just wait for it a bit longer, it’s absolutely going to come down, any second now.”
Diana Abu-Jaber
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August 2011
2 posts
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July 2011
3 posts
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“For me, a novel is like a city coming to life around you—but a world one can never really inhabit. A short story is a late-night conversation with a stranger in the park: very immediate, intimate, fleeting. Writing a novel is different. It’s really all inspired revision. Did you know that the John Harrison clocks from the early 1700s required about eight hours to disassemble and about the...
took a drive in the dirty rain
Hey hey, sha la la
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Missed Characters: Frat Girl
Missed Characters is (will be) a regular feature on this blog, modeled after the popular Craigslist feature Missed Connections. I come across people all the time that I think could have made great fictional characters, or that I imagine could have fascinating stories – good, bad or ugly – so I come back home and I give them a quick, rough one here.
It’s Thursday in early April and...
June 2011
4 posts
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A good lens
“Here’s what I believe: The perfect writing you might do lies already waiting for you like a sculpture inside. Your job is to subtract: Subtract the ego, the chorus of censors and self-numbing devices, the greater question of the indulgence of art or any distraction that fuzzes intention. Your flavor is your subjectivity, your take on the mysterious world we live in, and if you contribute it...
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On investments
Sarah sleeps late on Saturday mornings, and these mornings have turned into a decadent time for Shane and I. We get up and dressed early and come down to sit on the stools at the breakfast table by the open window, morning air cooling our coffees too fast, and each work on our respective things — me on a novel or short story manuscript, he on a side-project app he’s developing for...
Thoughts on 40
I turned 40 earlier this year, and I’ve had some things floating around in my head about that – like that I seem to have learned more about myself, changed more bad habits/become addicted to more good ones, made more progress on projects (some lifelong), ushered more good/bad things in/out of my life, appropriately, refined my instinct about what to ignore and what to pursue, and had more...
May 2011
1 post
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Old Writing
I was going through boxes in the bedroom, which was once an attic and so still feels and is therefore treated like one in some ways, and I found two of my old journals, circa 1985-1990. Some days they were diaries, more often they were bits of stories to save for later. I picked these two out today, one from April 1988 and one from July. I would have been seventeen.
“The highway flew along...
April 2011
2 posts
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March 2011
1 post
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January 2011
2 posts
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The River
I have given birth to twelve babies. I am overwhelmed. My teenage daughter suggests gaily that we take them to the foot bridge and toss them over, and so with what she takes as subtle inference of my approval she loads them all into a sack and we walk, and when we reach the bow of the bridge she in the most casual way unloads them, dumps the bag over the edge and shakes it out, making sure...
October 2010
1 post
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September 2010
2 posts
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Above the Narrow Gauge
My bedroom is rough and warm. It is being remodeled, or I have just moved in at the time that it is needing to be remodeled, with paint and plaster peeling off the walls exposing big chunks of lath underneath. The floors are concrete, stained and chipped, piles of white canvas tarps everywhere like somebody had started working it, maybe me, a long time ago, but hasn’t gotten far. The...