drmstream[writing]

Vision is the art of see­ing what is invis­i­ble to oth­ers. Jonathan Swift This sketch is easy to pass over.  It doesn’t con­form to our stan­dards of baby memorabilia…of pho­tographs in a lit­tle brag book or on our dig­i­tal phone, moments of “look here,” “isn’t that cute,” “ooh” and “ahh.” The sketch is an after­thought, pencil […]

A human being is part of a whole…[but] he expe­ri­ences him­self, his thoughts and feel­ings as some­thing sep­a­rate from the rest…This delu­sion is a kind of prison for us, restrict­ing us to our per­sonal desires and to affec­tion for a few per­sons near­est to us. Our task must be to free our­selves from this prison […]

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 […]

You are read­ing this on a device pow­ered by a micro-processor, ren­dered by photo-electric diodes, built from bits and bytes. You are pro­cess­ing the sig­ni­fier of each let­ter in its encoded mean­ing through each word, and cumu­la­tively, through the com­bi­na­tion of words that appear on the screen. The con­tract between you and I is that […]

via youtube.com A great taste of what NY felt like 100 years ago, with a lit­tle com­edy thrown in. The energy and the bus­tle of today has a long his­tory. from Dan McCarthy’s Stream

I worked my way out of a 20-year pho­bia about writ­ing and now I don’t know what’s what. When I write with focus and sim­plic­ity, I feel the energy of under­stand­ing. I fin­ish the ses­sion glad that I wrote some­thing. Then a stretch passes where I don’t get the glad feel­ing and I don’t write […]

Some months later, after going on with the Cen­sus Bureau full-time, Ade­laide will be sit­ting in a vast room in Man­hat­tan with a hun­dred other women, work­ing through the cen­sus sheets from other dis­tricts in New York City, cal­cu­lat­ing the sums of each page and plac­ing the sheets in great binders that are orga­nized by […]

Fifty years ago, my mom was at the begin­ning, my dad was at the begin­ning, I was about to start. We were all in Worces­ter, in the lit­tle apart­ment. Nine months was com­ing to an end: the mar­riage was 11 months old. What voices ran through their minds? It was a start­ing out. They were […]

Over the past two years, I’ve worked my way out of a 20-year writer’s block. Or, less dra­mat­i­cally, I started writ­ing reg­u­larly again after a 20-year hia­tus. Through this process, I’ve had to watch out for pat­terns of thought and activ­ity that would take me back to the place where I would not write. I’m […]

When I was 14 or so, my father  reclaimed a sail­boat that had been left untended for years on a trailer under the trees near our house. The open deck had been closed in by a waxed, mildewed can­vas cover. Under the moss and grit that cov­ered the hull, the wood was still sturdy and sound. […]