January 2012
10 posts
August 2011
2 posts
Explaining Earmuffs
I wrote this piece nearly three years ago for a Creative Non-Fiction class I took with a woman who would become one of my favorite professors, Gretchen Legler. For those of you wondering why on earth I would leave paradise for F-town, Maine, I think the answer lay here in this essay all along.
_____________________________
I took the kids for a walk today, bundled up in hoodies and corduroy...
Velocity
This is by far the most personal thing (but why write if you’re not willing to be open to a little exposure?) I’ve ever written. A friend of mine recently made me remember it…and how I read it aloud to a room packed with students, parents, professors and friends. Reading it now…I realize this is why I’m a writer.
Velocity
I skip this stone,
flat-bottomed...
May 2011
2 posts
Quiet Evasions and Casual Cheer (Non-Fiction)
I had a rough day today…so I dug this essay I wrote two years ago out to remind me that I am sane, I am a good mom, and yeah, it’s time to get my daughter help. For all the moms out there that might be feeling exactly the same way, this is for you:
Quiet Evasions and Casual Cheer
Bad days come without warning. One moment, my daughter is a happy, smiling child with the disposition...
Rain Down on Me
It’s not what it will be (and thank you to my two faithful readers, Luka and Mason)…but it’s getting there:
“But plant your hope with good seeds / Don’t cover yourself with thistle and weeds / Rain down / Rain down on me” ~ Mumford & Sons, “Thistle and Weeds”
Summer in Central Maine is a capricious and fearsome thing of beauty. She will lovingly warm the hills and...
December 2010
4 posts
Dandelions - Revised
The other Mary makes a brief appearance in this story:
“I will never marry. There, I’ve said it. Oh, it feels so freeing saying it out loud finally!” June Fairholm’s hand hovered for a moment, fingers curled around the delicate handle of the china cup. Violets circled the rim, occasionally dipping petals into the coffee within. The china had been her grandmother’s, and for a time it had sat...
The Other Mary - Revised
Still tinkering with this one, but it’s almost in its final state:
The buzz of voices—“Thank you for calling VitaMix Customer Service our hours are Monday through Friday 8am to 4pm and you can also get us on Saturday from 9am to 8pm though you won’t get me on Saturday that’s my day off that’s right my name is Joan have a nice evening!”—and the tat-tat-tat of Smith-Corona typewriters hovered...
A Little of My Mom s Voice
I was not born from my mother. Instead, when I was 25, she made me her own when she married my father in 1997. She sat me down the day after they became engaged and told me that I didn’t have to call her “Mom,” but from that moment I was going to be her daughter whether I liked it or not. I liked it just fine, and soon, she became the only mother I’d ever really had. She...
November 2010
1 post
October 2010
5 posts
Lightning Strikes Down on the Partlow Road
If I’d been paying attention, I’d have realized that all signs that afternoon and evening pointed to Bad Times. In retrospect, I can practically see one of those flashy neon signs, the kind you might see in Vegas with the crazy lightbulbs chasing each other? spelling out, Yup, Bad Times Ahead, Doss, So You Better Get Under Cover. But in the way of hindsight and 20/20 vision, I was too blind to see...
On the Number 50 Cardinal
On the evening Cardinal train from Chicago’s Union Station bound for Washington, D.C., Jack Bennett leaned back in his seat as the green West Virginia mountains flashed past the window next to him. Across the aisle and one row down, two girls, maybe in their early twenties, were talking quietly. Every now and then, the one sitting in the aisle seat would turn her head and casually glance at him...
It Starts This Way
After all, some stories are better left unwritten. Pen to paper, words to a page—they are thieves of a sort, robbing the throbbing heart behind them of some indefinable quality that keeps the story alive in my mind, my heart, irrevocably reducing the truth of the moment to something flat, just a pale imitation of its former self.
For instance, I can write these words: I loved him, and already I...
Five Things
After Lanake left, I took to writing small notes to him on spare scraps of paper torn from the corner of notebook pages or receipts. At first, the pain was too great to write more than simple things: I miss you, or I’m sorry. Later, I wrote more, the things I couldn’t tell him: I cried for a month after you left. Cried so much I made myself sick until I thought the emptiness would swallow me...
Orchid
see these orchid petals—pale green and soft— they fell one by one from the lei you laid over my shoulders saved in a saucer they’re all i have left now of you and i, i collected them carefully and i, i saved them here because i couldn’t save us will i ever be free of this?
September 2010
14 posts
working title: The Boy Who Wouldn't Speak
I hate the title, but this is a story I actually started two years ago as part of a volunteer workshop I set up for my daughter’s fourth grade class. It’s a very rough draft, and Juvenile Fiction, so not my usual genre, but I think it could end up being a book length story…
Spring, as apparent in the dusty brown lawns crusted with a winter’s worth of road sand and grime as in the...
found: notes from a passing train
West Virginia:
Mysterious and green. Traveling along the river as night falls, small camps resting along the river, almost in the water. A sudden waterfall. Dark green mountains parting for the water as it twists and turns. If I could live anywhere in the world, it wouldn’t be on a beach, it would be on a river like this one, still and quiet, sleeping shacks resting here and there. I keep...
found: note to myself in my journal from an april...
“remember the walk you took this morning, sky blue as birds, wind chilly as it circles the dead leaves and road sand around you, but carrying the promise of Spring. remember the tree branches and their tight buds, like tiny, twisted fingers reaching, reaching for life.”
Dandelions
Last week’s story for my Fiction Workshop:
“I will never marry. There, I’ve said it. Oh, it feels so freeing saying it out loud finally!” June’s hand hovered for a moment, fingers curled around the delicate handle of the china cup. Violets circled the rim, occasionally dipping petals into the coffee within. The china had been her grandmother’s, and for a time it had sat unused,...
It Starts This Way
(I sort of dreamed this last night…I have no idea where it’s going, but the dream was so vivid, I had to write it down.)
It starts this way:
His hands on mine, fingers soft as they pull me along. “Come on,” he calls, and we run over the sand at the water’s edge. The wind is blowing at our backs, and I feel light on my feet as we race past the blue water. Suddenly he stops, spinning me,...
Dodie Brent
This is a work in progress using a character from the story “Butterflies”…
Morning. Again. Dodie Brent opened her eyes just in enough to take in the daylight, then rolled over with a sigh again. The mattress was old, with an unnatural bounce and lumps in the exact places she didn’t want them. The walls of her bedroom crawled with an ancient floral wallpaper, white...
@Silvansky:
@Masondakine:
Overheard: @silvansky its from a play ffs tumblr.com/xxdi3bx…
What play? The Breakfast Club? LOL
You veel tell me!!
The Other Mary
The buzz of voices (“Thank you for calling VitaMix Customer Service our hours are Monday through Friday 8am to 10pm and you can also get us on Saturday from 9am to 8pm though you won’t get me on Saturday that’s my day off that’s right my name is Joan have a nice evening!”) and the tat-tat-tat of clicking keyboards hovered over the third-floor cubicles of the Vitamix Household Division Customer...
Reincarnation
“I love you. I do. I just don’t…” His voice, the voice she had allowed herself to love, the voice she longed to hear every day, soft, husky, with the faintest hint of an unspecific accent, trailed off, and Marjorie dropped the spoon she’d been holding and clutched the phone hard as she felt her stomach clench. Stephen didn’t finish, but then, Marjorie thought, he didn’t have to. There were...
Butterflies
Mary Mulholland was getting the color solution rinsed from her hair. Every six weeks on the Friday morning, come rain or shine, she visited the Curl Up & Dye salon in Tufton to get her roots done. She had been doing so for near on thirty years, and she expected she would still be doing so for another thirty more. Now she lay backwards against the funny shampoo bowl with the gap cut out for...
