Of Elsewhere
So. I have my 240,000-word trilogy Of Evernost in a depressingly boring first draft. I have to keep reminding myself: it was supposed to be bad, it had to be bad if it was ever going to be done. I’ve revamped the structure in my head. I’m provisionally getting rid of two novellas (there were nine originally, three per volume) […]
Today’s post is adapted from an essay I started a few years ago and recently rediscovered. I hope you enjoy it. It definitely gets at some of the struggles I have creating. “Get inside the sound,” said the leader of the African drum group. Fifteen of us sat inside a room in the local art […]
I have a lot of balls in the air right now. Grad School Bug is almost but not quite dead, but I’ve written this 20-some page paper on Diana Wynne Jones that I want to try to edit and publish. Unfortunately, I can’t motivate myself to work on it anymore now that it’s preliminarily done. […]
The grad school bug is waning. This because I remembered viscerally rather than intellectually that Evernost needs all the time I can give it and then some (it is a long, potentially extremely long, poem with bits of prose that are almost prose poetry, and I want to illustrate it copiously, so….), and I want […]
Today I bring tidings of two minor projects I’m working on as a result of the Grad School Bug: reading Elizabeth Ammons’ Brave New Words, a call for optimistic, inclusive, and activist teaching in the humanities, and writing an essay exploring the concepts of truth Diana Wynne Jones develops in four pivotal poems in her […]
I seem to change my mind often about my reading plans. On Tuesday, after finishing Wordsworth, I decided to read Reader-Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-Structuralism, on the theory that I could contextualize C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, perhaps in ways I could write about productively. I wasn’t able to finish the book today, as I’d hoped […]
During high school, I loved to talk with my mother about whether C.S. Lewis had successfully proven that morality is valid the way axioms of mathematics are. I think we both thought not (as I recall, we were looking primarily at Mere Christianity and possibly The Abolition of Man) I was open to the possibility and strongly wanted […]
A young girl with a four-letter L name is whisked off to a land of perpetual winter because she climbed into a wardrobe, all through the agency of a dominating male character whose name begins with the letters As. She must help defeat a deceptively charming, poisonously evil woman who kidnaps a boy the protagonist […]
So, one of the supposed Rules of Writing is that one should use “active” verbs instead of “passive” verbs, and usually this boils down to avoiding forms of the verb to be. In an effort to drill this into our tender high school brains, a teacher gave us a handout with the following sentence: It is the act […]
My mom was a volunteer docent at a contemporary art museum when I was growing up, which meant I was exposed early and often to a lot of interesting art, including at least one exhibit of outsider art that really, really grabbed me. Since then, I’ve been strongly attracted to outsider art, both the strange, […]
Of Elsewhere 