drmstream[writing]

When I grew up there were no straight lines. My mother is an artist.  She taught me every line has life.  A draw­ing doesn’t rep­re­sent, it breathes. When I was a teenager my mother went through a cre­ative tran­si­tion.  She didn’t paint as much.  She learned print­mak­ing and pro­duced a series of aquat­ints and etchings. […]

I read a book the other day that is very pop­u­lar with peo­ple who are look­ing for answers to uni­ver­sal ques­tions. The writ­ing was con­cise and clear, and the imagery was acces­si­ble, despite strik­ing me as overly sim­ple. Most strik­ing was the style. Every chap­ter was short, every para­graph was short, every sen­tence was short. The […]

A gen­tle slope drops from the back of our house to an old stone wall, and beyond, a pond sur­rounded by high trees.  The pond was a lime­stone pit once; the still sur­face mir­rors the dark­ness below.  An oak tree fell into the shal­low south end and in the warm months a slen­der grey heron […]

  This blog is an inad­ver­tent place, nei­ther com­mon­place book nor pub­lish­ing plat­form, dis­or­derly in approach but earnest in inten­tion, a bal­ance of self provo­ca­tion, hope­ful procla­ma­tion and inter­mit­tent dis­trac­tion. Despite its irres­olute intent, drmstream[writing] frames a rela­tion­ship for a kind-of writer and a kind-of audi­ence.  There is a group of you — a few […]

Detec­tive Sun­der­son walked back­ward on the beach glanc­ing around now and then to make sure he wasn’t going to trip over a piece of drift­wood. The wind out of the north­west had to be over fifty knots and the blow­ing sand stung his face and grated his eyes. It was below freez­ing and the surf […]

Writ­ing prac­tice keeps your brain awake and alive; it improves your abil­ity to con­cen­trate.  Whether or not you ever pub­lish a thing, reg­u­lar writ­ing prac­tice will give you skills you can use in your work and your per­sonal life, and make you feel more empow­ered.  It will improve your abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate, stim­u­late your curiosity, […]

A pho­to­graph can make some­thing mun­dane appear unique and dis­tinc­tive. The ren­dered image metas­ta­sizes into some­thing alto­gether dif­fer­ent. One of my favorite exam­ples is street pho­tog­ra­phy. A tal­ented pho­tog­ra­pher can take a can­did photo of two women at a street cor­ner, star­ing jaun­tily at the cam­era. If we encoun­tered these women in every­day life we […]

  Recently, I was talk­ing with a math­e­mati­cian. He was ani­mated as he talked about the beauty of math, the thrill of tak­ing an axiomatic sys­tem and using its prin­ci­ples to build a bridge to a solu­tion for what appears to be a wholly unre­lated prob­lem. The excite­ment in his man­ner was infec­tious and deep. He […]

… All these moments in the individual’s life, when the uni­ver­sal laws of human fate break in upon the pur­poses, expec­ta­tions, and opin­ions of the per­sonal con­scious­ness, are sta­tions along the road of the indi­vid­u­a­tion process. This process is, in effect, the spon­ta­neous real­iza­tion of the whole man. The ego con­scious per­son­al­ity is only a […]

This must be the week that small presses, indie jour­nals and agents plow through their in-boxes. I’ve got­ten a slew of rejec­tions this week — no inter­ests on a short novel I’ve been send­ing around, no thanks you’s on a cou­ple of sto­ries that are cir­cu­lat­ing and flat out nopes on an essay I had […]