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art Evernost news

2022, a Year (Relatively) Lost to Social Media

I have tried and failed to come back to regular blogging so many times it’s getting embarrassing. But persistence (especially against one’s own flakiness) is worthy, and so — in time for the new year — I hope to make another push to write every week. In the meantime, I would like to talk a […]

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reading

The Four Zoas: Personal Response and Discussion

So, I’ve already broken my promise a little—but perhaps only a little.  I don’t have  deep close reading in this entry. What I’m offering instead is some observations on my responses to Night the First of The Four Zoas (outlined in more detail here). Those who read my last blog posts on Blake will notice Blake’s […]

Categories
Musings writing

Thoughts on Publishing

We all know it’s hard to get published. My intermittent efforts show this (I am, as of August, trying to submit poems every month—haven’t submitted any for October yet but preparing), and the process has been very tough on many of my friends who’ve been through it more than I have. I think this is […]

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art Musings writing

Get Inside the Sound

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 […]

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Musings news writing

Summer Snares: Setting Creative Priorities

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. […]

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Musings writing

Tools, Not Rules

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 […]

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art Musings reading

Outsider Art and Me

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, […]

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reading

The Artist’s Way: Book Review

I enjoy reading the odd book about creativity, art, and writing—the more inspirational and romantic (as opposed to inclined to reduce everything to craft) the better. I’ve been curious about Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way for a long time, so I checked it out from a local library, and I’ve now read all but the appendix.  […]

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writing

Evernost Complete!!!

Well, the title is something of an overstatement. I am not convinced that either Evernost the imaginary place or Evernost the real writing project will ever be complete. There is poetry to be written and illustrations to be created and new plots to explore and innumerable whatchamacallits off to the side. What is complete is […]

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art writing

I Wrote a Book(let)!

This post is a very long time in coming, but I have a better excuse than usual. I just put together, printed, and provided to bookstores my first real book: an illustrated poetry chapbook. It’s very, very short (ten pages, four in black and white), because I wanted it to be affordable for both me […]