Of Elsewhere
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
People love children’s and young adult fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones because her novels are funny, action-packed, full of twists and turns, clever, and skillful in their manipulation of and commentary on fantastic and mythological tropes. Some that I only care about only a little (I don’t require lots of action, and clever or “clever” reworkings […]
Of Elsewhere 