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Harvesting Fog
Monday September 20, 2010
I love the way that Luci Shaw talks about the craft of poetry. This has been her topic in many essays over her long writing career. But I think I love especially the image she develops in the foreword to her latest collection of poems, Harvesting Fog. There she recounts how in a damp but arid Peruvian coastal city, people hang rags and nets on their balconies until they’re saturated with moisture, then wring out the water they’ve collected. Shaw goes on: "That’s a lot like writing poems. Something’s in the air, a word, an impression, a rhythmic phrase, a sound, a small connection. You grab it and then you catch more drops and pool them altogether, and wring some fresh meaning out of them....
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Death and All His Friends
Friday September 17, 2010
Summer is a time of family pilgrimages less fraught than their holiday counterparts, but sometimes just as freighted. I could bore you with a list of all the calamities that sent me home this past summer—heartbreaks, crises, etc.—but I won’t. I’ll just tell you that I went home and that my going home coincided with death. I’ve missed so many deaths, living away from a hometown where my family has a history of generations and where, until I lit out a decade ago, our life together was relatively untouched by transience....
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In Good Company
Thursday September 16, 2010
I nearly didn’t come to my first Glen Workshop eleven years ago, when it was held at the rustic and remote Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, New Mexico. A week to work on my writing, however enticing, seemed impractical and self-indulgent. Why should I spend so much time—and money—away from home? My wife, Jill, who has always been wiser, insisted I go, that she would attend to everything in my absence. When my flight was canceled an hour before my scheduled departure, I nearly gave up. Jill insisted again, and once again I listened....
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Foraging
Wednesday September 15, 2010
I went mushroom hunting in August. In the Wet Mountains of southern-central Colorado, at approximately 11,000 feet, we bent over loamy soil in search of the shiny, reddish-brown caps of Boletus edulis, familiar to many as porcini. We: my friends Eva and John, their dog Kippy, and I. (Kippy didn’t mushroom hunt as much as dart among the trees and explore smells, looking up frequently to keep John in sight.) We set out around nine in the morning, at 8,000 feet, in a valley with creek- and irrigation-fed meadows for cattle. Soon, the valley narrowed....
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When at The Glen Workshop…
Tuesday September 14, 2010
…Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Perhaps not as enticing a mode of conduct as its idiomatic Roman counterpart, but no less enriching when all is said and done. For now that the 2010 Glen Workshop is said and done, I stand enriched in the afterglow as if with a holy kind of hangover. Not that there wasn’t some indulgence of the Roman stripe as well, but the hangover I mean isn’t one, thankfully, to leave me any time soon....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
