On th train, back from th Empress dining car, snowing woodlands ,pulling thru Manitoba, recall how sum yrs after th second centenary of th founding of Halifax, which date i commemorated with sign above my father’s street door
A glossary of acronyms and initialisms designed for the note-passing phases of high-school courtship, from 2gether 4ever: Notes of a Junior High School Heartthrob by Dene Larson, published in 2004 by Chronicle Books.
We were setting fires in a dry gulch in the hills at the edge of town, with crumpled sagebrush and bits of tumbleweed and no paper for kindling, and we had to start our own fire with a single match the way they did in the Cub Scout troop that met Thursday nights in the basement of St. Paul’s Anglican church on Battle Street.
Mary Meigs and her friend Lise Weil, editor of Beyond Recall, met regularly to do freewriting together. For each exercise they chose a line or phrase from the work of a poet they both admired; then, inspired by that “prompt,” both women wrote for five or ten minutes, recording whatever came to mind (and hand).
It’s cooling on a rack on the kitchen counter. David sits on the couch, cleaning under his fingernails with a corner of his Safeway card, and I fuss with the flowers in the kitchen. We’re both getting ready, in our own ways. I’ll say this now: we love Milt and Janey. They are our best friends and they are getting married. David is particularly affected by the news, because of his history with Janey. They aren’t in love any more, but I know he has a sweet spot for her.
My greatest difficulty at eighty-five is to think coherent thoughts. I want to think about old age and instead my blurry eyes are drawn away from this paper by the movement of spring leaves, yellow-green, outside the window. They have been tossed by the wind for days and have grown into darker green summer leaves that fill the red spaces of the brick wall behind.
In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.
Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what we read in order to figure out how it was done. With this in mind I bought two second-hand books from the island bookstore: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Vintage) and Doris Lessing’s Winter in July (Panther), which, according to the inscription on the first page, had in 1976 been owned by an acquaintance of mine, the writer Margaret Horsfield, who lives on another small island in the Strait of Georgia.
Two days later I took Wayman’s workshop, Catching Fire, which was guaranteed to inspire us to get writing. He told us, among other things, that once we became writers we would no longer read for pure pleasure because we would always be analyzing what we read in order to figure out how it was done. With this in mind I bought two second-hand books from the island bookstore: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (Vintage) and Doris Lessing’s Winter in July (Panther), which, according to the inscription on the first page, had in 1976 been owned by an acquaintance of mine, the writer Margaret Horsfield, who lives on another small island in the Strait of Georgia.
