Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art. Ralph Waldo Emerson There’s a purpose to this great thing that the Internet has spawned beyond the creation of commerce engines, marketing campaigns and wealth beyond our wildest imagination. The world has become too large, genius too widely distributed, stories too important and creativity [...]
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 [...]
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a [...]
In a Dark Time In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood– A lord of nature weeping to a tree, I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den. What’s [...]
An old tree came down at the edge of the property in a windstorm. It sat below the cottage at the edge of the farm road. The base was massive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, making it appear foreshortened against the sky. The trunks and branches [...]
She’s young here, not yet 20, and her future isn’t written in her face. She’s experienced sadness. Her father died when she was young and her family was reduced to a mean existence, the froth and frivolity of a town life erased by the shadows of tenement rooms. But she’s smart, pretty and determined. She’ll [...]
I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.” — Jack Kerouac The first time that I read On the Road, it took days for the roar to subside. The world Kerouac painted [...]
On a trail I walk there is an old tree that has given up life but stands rooted stolidly in the ground. The trunk is thick and black. The seasons have embalmed it. The wood is so hard that the bark won’t break off in your hands. The boys pick up stray scraps that have [...]
Here’s how I work: I’ve got a long project underway that takes focus and energy. To keep my mind limber and my imagination at play, I explore distractions in short bursts. I’ll write a story, mull an idea, research a set of images or some idle question. These are amusements. All the while, I’ve got [...]
Whenever we find, in two forms of life that are unrelated to each other, a similarity of form or of behavior patterns which relates to more than a few minor details, we assume it to be caused by parallel adaptation to the same life-preserving function. Konrad Lorenz One hot Friday afternoon a long time ago [...]