“My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along.”
Ezra Jack Keats: The Joy of Being Alive
Better Things, Maybe
And suddenly we saw everything differently. The simplicity of the story seemed significant, even profound. The simplicity of the language seemed elemental, important. The repetition made beautiful, resonant little circles of words. And everything we’d learned about writing was bullshit.
This Decaying Sense
And this is true of man and beast, as well sleeping as waking.
Eris and her Apples of Discord
If you ignore these apples, they’re small and harmless. But the more attention you pay them, the more you try to get rid of them, the larger they get, until they block your way entirely, or destroy you.
Rag and Bone
He hasn’t lost the love or the language, he’s just brought them down to earth. He’s using them to make the ordinary beautiful–rags, bones, broken bottles. And things as extraordinarily ordinary as aging, as remembering.
Linden Tea Madeleines
But this magical madeleine and tea, which he accepts while full of adult cares and woes, brings him such joy that he no longer feels mediocre, accidental, mortal, which is what being an adult feels like, on a bad day.
Letter From the Editor July: Words and Silence
It seems more important now than ever to tell our stories and share our stories, and listen to the stories of others. To amplify the voices of anybody struggling to be heard, and to celebrate when the words or images or silences speak to us or bewilder us or transform us. To harness our anger or sadness or joy in a wild productive fury, resonating with the strange perfect words we make our own or the deafening silences we inhabit.
Spirits and Demons
These phantasms are concocted from a little kernel of conscience, or guilt, or fear, or loneliness. Sometimes others see them, sometimes they don’t, they’re shifting and dreamlike, and they operate according to their own rules. They’re unreliable narrators. They’re wise or foolish, in turn; they speak in riddles, they speak a questionable truth, changing and suspect, like all truths.
Flash Fiction: Pond
Cars wait at the light. You are at the breakfast table in bare feet, wearing Jillian’s robe. A woman in a heavy coat labors onto the bus carrying all her things, a line of riders shuffle behind. Brakes release.
Why I Love: Re-reading Books. And a recipe for Jane Austen’s White Soup
To me, re-reading a story you’ve loved, after a distance of a few years or even decades, is delicious. (And so is this soup!)
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