Growing Versions

There are so many answers out there. Everywhere I look, solutions, open letters, advice, tips, reading lists, the top 5 movies, suggestions galore. Invariably, the way these answers are arranged, I get kind of tricked into thinking that I asked a question in the first place. Rumi said "silence is the best answer". Perhaps, the same goes for questions. WifeMotherExpletive  declared that June she would go paper based for a month, I am going to follow her lead.  I need some loose leaf to dream up my own questions and listen for the answers in the morning light, the budding lily of the valley and the ripening strawberries or some other place I haven't noticed yet. I'll let the paper absorb the ink for a while.

Our day starts the same way almost everyday. What day is this? Is it a free day? A gym day? A library day?  I answer. Then, I pack the lunches. In that order.

45 minutes selling lemonade=just enough money for a box full of stuffies at the other yard sale 45 minutes sitting at a yard sale=a second hand coffee maker for dad's birthday present

waldeinsamkeit (german) n. The feeling of being alone in the woods. Not loneliness, but solitude in/with nature.

A dream you don't want to wake up from, or a goodmare as my daughter used to call it, can be like a bulky sturgeon, twisting and thrusting out of your arms, intent on swimming up stream away from you. Or, put another way, it is like the lights being thrown on after an incredible movie that you don't want to end. You stumble around for a bit even though it is bright, while your eyes and your heart adjusts to being kicked out of the plot. So, as I feel myself slipping back into the world, I make mental notes of a fleeting dream. I deliberately (as deliberately as one can when one is semi-conscious) take in my surroundings.  With the knowledge that it is going to end, I take some photographs with my mind's eye and do what I can to immerse myself in it as it leaks away. I also, once I am awake, attempt to re-tell it to myself to make it, or at least the feelings it created, to last a bit longer. What are your strategies for savouring or prolonging those last fleeing mo...

Right after I posted my ambition to write a novel via twitter , a few issues imposed themselves. a) unless I write the novel in reverse, it will be difficult to follow after a while because you'll have to go all the way back to the first tweet to read it in the correct order. b) twitter is meant to be social, so short of not following anyone, and constantly, rigorously, purging the account of automatic followers,it won't quite work etc..it should be a social enterprise. So, now I am not writing a novel on twitter. We are writing a novel on twitter.  I have posted three tweets so far.  You are going to help me write it.  You just have to preface any additions with @JointNovel and write a tweet or two when you feel like it. Think about the primary improv rule. Always say yes.  (Don't thwart others' attempts to go in a new direction, build on each other's ideas). Keep it (relatively) clean and avoid cliches (if possible.)  Let's see what we can writ...

"If we want the rewards of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known." -Tim Kreider

I try to write close to the bone. I don't write too close, in case I nick something vital that can't be exposed, like a vein.

A lot of famous writers published their novels first in serial form in the newspaper of the day. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers one chapter at a time. I was reminded of  this the other day after a morning of debauchery, feeling slightly ill, bingeing on one episode after another of Call the Midwife and compulsively scrolling through a random smattering of tweets on Twitter. When I re-read The Stranger by Albert Camus last year I read it with newly twitter-conditioned eyes. I was keenly aware that his main character Meursault, who was hatched fully grown into a world that was questioning all the conventions that had governed life before. Perhaps there is no narrative, or morality post-modernism posited, perhaps life is just a series of random decisions and choices that make up our reality.  For this reason, this story of a post-modern poster man, who ends up killing a man because he gets irritated by hot sun,(just another decision in a long line of ot...

The water runs all year long. It runs through blizzards, it slows but does not stop as we languish in the heat.  We forget all about it until we remember. The mosquitoes hatch and the bees wake up on the rocks. A stick, if you throw it, will drift down the river like a boat. Sometimes the stick you choose to throw gets wedged between two rocks or a tree root.  So, you do some work dislodging it by finding another stick to free it. Then you watch it disappear from sight. We just remembered, we have running water.

When I come across a place where Barbie has been played with, it is like coming across a series of behind- the-scene still shots of another, more glamourous person's life.  It reminds me a bit of a time in my life when it was possible to gather everything up into a bag and move at a moment's notice (did I ever really live like that?) Observing her living area,  also feels a bit like she dropped everything when she got called away on an important ___________( fill-in-the blank) assignment.  Clothes are strewn through out her living area, mingled with teeny tiny phones, shoes and cooking utensils.She has closets and even an accessory vending machine but they are usually empty. She prefers to spread out her possessions in the open as some kind of record.