Browsed by
Category: writing

Outside Office

Outside Office

Comments 0 Comment

Working on the deck for a change, breeze blowing, crows cawing, Copper (newly shorn and feeling frisky) resting near my feet.

It’s clouded up here, and there’s enough moisture in the air to make me sleepy, even at 10 a.m.

After almost three months of working inside an overly air-conditioned building, it’s good to work with the sun over my shoulder and bird song in the air.

And good too, to lift my eyes from the screen and page to admire the day lilies and cone flowers, the begonias and the pot of campanula.

It’s summertime and the working (outside) is easy.

The Accidental Calligrapher

The Accidental Calligrapher

Comments 0 Comment

For the last couple of evenings I’ve been learning how to write. Yeah, I know. I’m supposed to be a writer already. But I have been learning to write, to form letters slowly and carefully, and it’s been alternately painful and exhilarating.

Through a series of events too long and complicated to explain I’ve been trying my hand at  calligraphy. At first I used a regular gel pen. Not good! Next an inexpensive ink-cartridge calligraphy pen I picked up at an office supply store. Better.

I’m not about to take up a new hobby, but I’ve been amazed at what a meditative process it is, especially for someone who makes a living from words. That I’m being forced to think about every stroke, every ascender and descender, the width and height and heft of each letter — is, in a strange sort of way, liberating.

It’s bringing me back to first principles. To the letters that form the words that carry the thoughts. It’s a cleansing of the mental palate, a reminder of how excruciating and precious each letter can be.

(Art: Modern Western Calligraphy, Denis Brown, 2006, courtesy Wikipedia)

Glass Houses

Glass Houses

Comments 0 Comment

I work in a box made of glass. Glass windows, glass doors, glass walls. I worry that one day I’ll be daydreaming and walk right into one of them. Where are bird stickers when you need them?

The glass begins in the lobby, where two sets of clear doors must be pushed or pulled to enter or exit. The lobby is so bright that I slip on my sunglasses the minute I step out of the elevator.

The glass continues upstairs where it’s easy to see who’s in or out, who’s meeting or on the phone. It’s that kind of place, which is to say transparent and modern and open and good. We’re all the same here, the glass box seems to say. We understand each other. We do not throw stones.

Except that the writer in me wants to be tucked away in a study carrel on the least used floor of the most arcane library in town. The writer in me wants shelter and coziness, dim light and nonreflective surfaces.

May Day

May Day

Comments 0 Comment

Ours starts out with rain, and not even warm rain. A cool 50-degree soaking that I hope hasn’t shocked the ferns, which I moved up from the basement yesterday.

It is, however, a green and portentous day, the beginning of a new month, a lovely, flower-filled one.

In the distance a cardinal sings. I can imagine it puffed up against the chill, delighting in the moisture as birds do.

The rain is making the companionable sound it does when it flows down the gutters and into the grass The yard is seeded and needs to be weeded. The rose is (mostly) trained. There are scads of to-dos on my list. But on this quiet Sunday morning, I sip my tea, make a list — and turn to words.

Building Stuff

Building Stuff

Comments 0 Comment

I work in a law school. Every day I use words to build articles, web stories, press releases and emails. The work I do is achieved with a click, a flick of the wrist.

Meanwhile, a block away, guys are roofing a major highway. For more than a year they’ve been moving utility lines and driving pillars into the ground. Now they’re using a giant crane to hoist huge  steel beams. Eventually, they will entunnel this stretch of I-395 and build a small neighborhood on top of it.

And I — I will continue building towers of words, the sometime dwelling place of ideas but often just ephemeral constructs that vanish the moment they’re sent.

A Vital Process

A Vital Process

Comments 0 Comment

In The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh: A Walk Through the Forest that Inspired the Hundred Acre Wood, author Kathryn Aalto takes us through Ashdown Forest, past Poohsticks Bridge and to the top of Gills Lap, with its panoramic view of England’s South Downs.

These are real places — but they are also places of the imagination, where A.A. Milne traveled with his real-life little boy, Christopher Robin, and perhaps saw peeking from the trees there a chubby bear and a winsome piglet.

Like many writers, Milne was a walker. And Aalto’s words describing that here could double as a mission statement for A Walker in the Suburbs.

A lifelong joy and habit for the author, walking sets the mind adrift, clarifying and organizing thoughts — a vital process for writers. Walking allows a pace for discovering small, new things: how gorse has the faint smell of coconut in spring, that the red dragonflies hovering over bogs are actually rare, and that the nocturnal bird calls are from the threatened nightjar.

Sets the mind adrift … clarifies and organizes thoughts … allows a pace for discovering small, new things …  Yes, yes and yes.

A vital process? Vital, indeed.

Good Walking

Good Walking

Comments 0 Comment

The day began early, but the only walking I’ve done is what was needed to take me to and from Metro. Which got me thinking about the difference between walking and good walking.

Walking is like writing. Both are humble and utilitarian occupations, something most people do all the time.

But like good writing — in which words are strung together in a way to arouse sympathy or disgust, beauty or ugliness — good walking elevates the pedestrian. It is more than just a way to move from one place to another. It is a conscious and reflective exercise.

Good walking wears out the body and fills up the soul. It turns otherwise dreary and muddled days into clear and purposeful ones.

Good walking — I hope to do some at lunchtime.

Pure Possibility

Pure Possibility

Comments 0 Comment

End of the week. End of ideas? Probably not. They will emerge again, maybe even in a few minutes. But this is the time I have to write, this crazy early time, propelled by sleeplessness to grab the few moments I can reasonably (or not so reasonably) claim.

What is it that makes these morning minutes so sacred? It is, in part, the quiet. Others sleeping. Tea steeping. The duties of the day still a couple of hours away (unless I check work email!).

But it is also a sense of anticipation, of having another day. A day that at this point is still pure possibility, not yet freighted with what might have been.

Making it Official

Making it Official

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday morning the plows made it through, so four days of newspapers landed in the driveway with a thud.

We weren’t exactly information starved over the long weekend. I always enjoy the hyped-up local TV and radio news before, during and after a snowstorm. And there’s the Capital Weather Gang, my go-to website with more analytics and blizzard models than you’d ever want to know.

Still, it was a relief to get the print product, to see this recent meteorological event dubbed one “for the ages”. It was almost (not quite) as if seeing it in print meant it really, truly happened. At the very least it was verification and retrospection.

But, this being a lively and full house, the papers were soon scattered across the counter and coffee table. Drinks were set down on them, breadcrumbs shaken on them.  And more than anything else, they — their late arrival, the news they bore — became part of the memory of this moment.

The Vibration

The Vibration

Comments 0 Comment

Some lines of poetry pop up often in my interior monologue. These are from high school, when I first read Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology.”

“The earth keeps some vibration going
There in your heart, and that is you.”

The poem is about Fiddler Jones, whose crops languished while he played music at every party and dance. He ended up with a “broken fiddle, a broken laugh, a thousand memories and not a single regret.” It is the epitaph of one who chose the artistic life, or one, I should say, whose artistic life was  chosen for him:

“And if the people find you can fiddle
Why fiddle you must for all your life.”

Such is not my fate. No one is dragging me away from press releases to write the Great American Essay. But I do wake up with internal music, a vague but pulsing beat. It says hurry up, get in, get busy. And on days that propel me from bed directly to the office — without even a quiet moment to sip tea and write my post in a dark, quiet living room — this is how I feel: that the earth has kept some vibration going while I was asleep and  when it grew too strong it woke me up.

The vibration is not artistry calling. It is duty calling. I have been reduced to to-do’s. How to change the vibration? That’s what I’m wondering now.