Today I was deposed by my husband’s lawyer as part of what has been a very painful and abusive divorce. The questioning was rigorous, required as much concentration as does writing. For once I felt that my long training in Flannery O’Connor’s notion of “the habit of art” was actually useful under totally different circumstances. …
I recently went to a lecture on “data dysentery”, the countless reams of data we educators collect for, well, for what? To this data, I would like to add the following, a record of the sheer number of observations I’ve had in one semester only, this last semester. These observations were done by three administrators …
This spring, I’m gaining in altitude by humbling myself before brocades of seaweed, breathing in the glow echoed in broken seashells and by glorifying the tree rings inside me. I want to write sap. I want to write purple prose, embellish an altogether elegant alphabet. Pristine light stalks me. Clouds are full of rosy, soul …
“I passed my driver’s test!” I cried and jumped like a 5-year-old seeing pandas for the first time in the zoo. I got my temporary Pennsylvania driver’s license last weekend at Penn Hills Station, Pittsburgh, after four months’ constant practice behind the wheel. It was my belated rite of passage since I am ten years …
I’ve been reading The Splendor of Letters by Nicholas Basbane, absorbed by his stories of poets and writers connecting through time—of literature saved from obscurity or rescued from oblivion by translators, by booklovers, by fellow writers. I’ve also been inhabiting all those terrible times he details, when an entire culture’s writings have been obliterated—deliberate attempts …
“The trouble with you, Arlene,” a friend said, “is you can’t stay mad.” How right she was. Too much negative capability, I suppose—I begin to put myself in someone else’s shoes, see there might be another side to the story. As soon as I make a sweeping generalization, I think of an exception. So though …
I generally share my poems with a few friends before I mail them out. A sample audience, as it were. Because of this, I’ve been asked how I came to write the enclosed, as the voice and tone are different from poems I’ve written lately. Perhaps the following note, written to a friend and editor, …
It happens sometimes, quick as a wink and just in the nick of time—the mega-attack of pure joy. I never know when it’s coming, but when it does, as it did last night, I’m seized by joy, end up singing and dancing around the house just like a child, just like a very happy child, …