drmstream[writing]

She was eccen­tric, strong, heav­ily opin­ion­ated, highly intel­lec­tual, and intensely pri­vate. She wore a floppy hat, a long dress, wool coat, and men’s shoes and walked with a pow­er­ful stride. With a cam­era around her neck when­ever she left the house, she would obses­sively take pic­tures, but never showed her pho­tos to any­one. Descrip­tion of […]

Part V: Greet­ings (This is Uncle Sam) I take the long way to the train sta­tion most days so I can drive past the place where the tor­nado touched down two springs ago. It was like some­one made up the whole thing when we heard about it. We don’t get tor­na­does. But one day a tornado […]

I want to assure you with all earnest­ness that no writ­ing is a waste of time — no cre­ative work where the feel­ings, the imag­i­na­tion, the intel­li­gence must work. With every sen­tence you write, you have learned some­thing. It has done you good. It has stretched your under­stand­ing. I know that. Even if I knew […]

  First, sink the foun­da­tions.  Pro­ceed slowly, make sure that each load-bearing point is set firm and square.  There’s no vis­i­ble progress and patience, an under­stand­ing of the big pic­ture, is required. Then, erect the frame.  Dis­trib­ute the force of the beams and gird­ers across the bear­ing loads. You have made the skele­ton, strung the tendons. […]

Part I: Just My Imag­i­na­tion Deep morn­ing city lights, all rounded edges and first sleep. A cab runs by and the chrome tires keep spin­ning. My eyes want to squint. I’m not ready to fall down. There’s a cost to flex­ing your sched­ule to get the last hour of work in. The pur­ga­tory of New York […]

  –I’ve got to make a polit­i­cal car­toon, the sixth-grade boy says to me.  I’m going down­stairs. I’m fid­dling with my iPad and half-watching the end of the US Open.  I’m just happy that he didn’t rope me into work­ing on the assign­ment and that he’s going down to the play­room alone.  Some­times he gets […]

Don’t you love the com­mu­nity around your inter­ests and enthu­si­asms that you find on the web? You can’t repli­cate the expe­ri­ence any­where in real life: the vari­ety of view­points, the excite­ment of shar­ing and the feel­ing of val­i­da­tion that comes from con­sort­ing with peo­ple who see the world from the same angle but who are […]

Alex would stop by in the morn­ing on the way to the shack where Nathan kept the two trucks down by the rail yard. Louis liked to wait for his cousin on the back step. He would watch Alex step­ping up the street, at one moment firm and quick in his stride, then just as […]

    My face is blank.  Soft skin.  The hint of lines.  More like you than not like you. You don’t like to see my face con­tort, its plas­tic­ity mak­ing anger, joy, sad­ness, fear.  When my face con­torts you think I look wrong. What we’re taught:  Keep your feel­ings in check.  Make the sad things feel better. […]

  When we read a story, our brains plot every­thing that’s going on, from the character’s phys­i­cal loca­tions in space to their inter­ac­tions with objects in the envi­ron­ment to their pur­suit of var­i­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tional goals.  Many of the brain areas active while read­ing are also active when we actu­ally take part in or […]