London

17 August 2022 This may be my I-think-I’ll-stay-home-for-awhile blog!  Does that give away much of what I thought of London?  (Of course, outside of London is another story!) We’ll see. . . London was iconic: phone booths, double-decker buses, awful food (breakfast: beans on toast). . . . In mid-July 2022 I went there for […]

Paris 2

23 July 2022             I “ran away” to Paris this past April.  It seemed, in retrospect, that the pandemic had affected me more than I had assumed.  At its inception, I was calm; after all, living alone and devoting myself to writing created its own isolation from the world.  I had few friends who lived […]

Paris

8 March 2022 I’ve done it: made the decision to flee this life for a bit. So, I’m headed to Paris for a month (exact time not to be disclosed here).  I plan to write, write, write. Why Paris? I could be facetious and say, “Why not?” but that isn’t the tone or tenor I […]

Le Temps Approche

revised and updated 20 March 2022 In less than a month, I will be flying to Paris to stay awhile and write – a dream I’ve had for some time now. I believe the change in scenery will do me good. I will spend my time on the Left Bank, expecting to see and contemplate […]

The Itch

The Inter-Tropical Convergence  Zone—more familiarly, the ITCZ (called the “Itch”)—is a belt about 5 degrees north and south of the Equator.  It is an area where the northern and southern trade winds clash, causing storms and then pushing the air upwards and becalming the atmosphere into windlessness: the doldrums. Although the etymology of the word […]

I Am A Writer

I haven’t decided if this title should be emphasized this way—I am a writer—or this way—I am a writer.  Of course, I could just give in to total emphasis and yell: I AM A WRITER, but that isn’t the point, not even close. At the end of December 2020 (the day after my birthday to […]

Old Habits

            When I was in college and introduced to T. S. Eliot’s poetry, I fell in love.  Something in his words, the arrangement of his lines, the ideas simply snatched me up in an intellectual embrace.  I talked about his poetry so much that my boyfriend at the time bought me the collected works of […]

Creative Writing

Creative writing—fiction, poetry—like any art starts, I think, with a “gift,” a talent, a desire to create sense and meaning out of our lives.  It may start with a conversation, an event, a memory, even an imagined idea—these are the “cloth” that all humans have; the writer, however, makes something of the cloth: gives it […]

T.S. Eliot

If it is possible to have a “hero” as a writer, then I choose T.S. Eliot as mine. Now being called a “paleo-modernist” (as if he were some class of dinosaur), I believe he speaks to every age that has succeeded him, that his poetry and drama are rich, inspiring literary works, and that the […]

Heroes

The current heroes [of the so-called deep state]: Gabriel Sterling, Voting System Implementation Manager (Republican) There is also a reluctant hero: Brian Kemp, Governor (Republican) The most memorable/admirable statement from Sterling: “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy, and all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this. […]