Years ago I read an essay by Annie Dillard in the Atlantic. I wish I could remember the title, the date. But the point is one of her lines (and Dillard's essays were always poetic) has stayed with me all these years. The line went something like this: I felt like a bell just before it is struck. She was standing in a field--a simple act--when she experienced seeing in a new way. When I first read this line I immediately flashed to a collection of small bells,...
Years ago, when I was trying to write a memoir about landscape, place, homeland, I worked for a time in my garage. The house I lived in was small--two bedrooms--and there was no study. So I put some plywood pieces together, rescued my great aunt's old Formica kitchen table, and moved to the garage. One of the advantages of having a garage for a study is the large walls. (One of the disadvantages is that it is cold in winter and hot as blazes in summer.) In the spirit...
Sometimes they come like padded cat's feet, sometimes crashing down in a sinus headache before dawn. Some writers think of them first (they become guides) and for others they're an afterthought. I remember when an artist friend of mine did me the honor of naming one of her pieces. It was made of hog gut--twisted, stretched, dried into a provocative elliptical form now dangling from her Kailua (Hawai'i) home ceiling. This was the same house she had to tent and treat because of the pervasive termites that plague the...
Never mind, for now, who will read it. We are seduced by a book's cover--or not. I hope you will like this one which features two photographs by Rick Dingus. No, this is not his "blue" period (note the sky) but work from the twenty years in which he created "photo drawings." With graphite or silver colored pencils, sometimes colored crayons, Rick challenges the notion that photographs are objective, real, true. He calls them incomplete "quotations" rather than facts and uses the drawings to blue the distinction between...
Preorder begins on June 12, 2023. www.finishinglinepress.com "Crisply vivid, witty, and at once far-seeing and a-whisper with intimacies...
Sometimes I feel the old house calling to me through its almost 100 years of existence. Through its builder, Jess Giles, its subsequent owners, my great Aunt Alice and Uncle Vern. Through the no doubt mice ridden electrical system and sputtering toilet, the kitchen's hot water barely warming the dinner dishes as it makes its way from the basement water heater upstairs. Nighttimes there I can sometimes hear something in the old chimney (the red foxes occasionally spotted? a squirrel? what?), a comfort rather than a scare. This past...
I'd just engaged in an argument with a feisty Cuban-American woman in which I said nothing. Nada, y pues nada. I was speechless though alert to what was about to happen when I saw her striding down the hall to the lost baggage claim, flanked by children and perhaps her mother, dragging a luggage trolley stacked high, bearing the same weary look we all had--all of us just arrived at the Tampa airport from Havana. She was shouting, shall I say, discouraging words. I had her bag all right....
Growing up I liked to think about how my home-town region had been called "a sea of grass." Riding out to our farm where there was still native grass stretching to the horizon, I imagined the Spaniards' and American Expedition leaders' apprehension as they tried to lay track across the llano estacado. But years later, the weight of that epithet really came home to me as I gazed at the ocean surrounding O'ahu near University of Hawai'i where I was teaching. When the local swimmers took off unfazed into...
I'd seen pictographs before. West of Vega at what we call "Paint Rock," what archaeologists call "Rocky Dell." It's an important pictograph site (pictographs are painted on rocks rather than incised like petroglyphs). In fact that site is the only Panhandle painted rock site cited in Kirkland's The Rock Art of Texas Indians (l967), based on field research done in the l930s. Turns out Kirkland, an artist himself and amateur researcher, made watercolor renderings of other major cites in Texas, the most stunning and prolific in the Lower Pecos...