drmstream[writing]

I. I called you as soon as I got back to my apart­ment.  You picked up.  My liv­ing room was hot.  I couldn’t breath.  You didn’t say any­thing.   The silence was like dark blotches of ink.  The phone line crack­led. “I’m com­ing back down.” “You don’t have to.” “I want to.  Will you be there.” “You don’t […]

The film­maker Erroll Mor­ris asked the ques­tion on Twit­ter, “I am inter­ested in assem­bling a col­lec­tion of sto­ries of peo­ple destroyed by read­ing (Any sug­ges­tions?)” and I wanted to make a smart con­tri­bu­tion but couldn’t shake a faint mem­ory of some­one wrapped in a blan­ket wan­der­ing Easton’s Beach with a tat­tered copy of Far From […]

 I posted a short piece the other day that shared some­thing of what it was like to grow up deaf.  The piece was impres­sion­is­tic and inten­tion­ally obscure, with the hope that the reader would find in its spare uncer­tainty and vivid imagery some­thing of the expe­ri­ence of hav­ing a sense impaired. The piece had […]

The table was made out of an old wire spool.  We cut the top off, pulled the slats out and made a tri­an­gu­lar base from heavy maple.  I don’t know how many yards of wire the spool held, but it must have been a lot, because we could fit the eight of us around the […]

My bed­room was no dif­fer­ent from any other room, in any other house, in any other place, but I could not have been more aware of how dif­fer­ent my place was. My bed rested below a long, tall win­dow that peeked out into the pine grove between our house and the road. To the right, […]

In my imag­i­na­tion, I am hang­ing this can­vas when I feel a frost on my cheek and the lin­ing of my lungs ices over. I am drawn head­first into the inky blue light of the river. The crisp snow abrades my raw hands. The bark of the tree fall scratches on my shirt. The cold […]

In the moment that he held her his world was silent. This was the silence of awe. It was unfa­mil­iar to him. He felt like every­thing that was mag­i­cal and impor­tant in his life, the libraries he had sat in, the sketches he had drawn, the excite­ment he felt as he made a point that surprised […]

Do you have things that you think you remem­ber, that you should remem­ber, but that you don’t really know? When you open your­self to these images, they hang imma­te­r­ial and allur­ing. Sci­ence has taught us that when we imag­ine remem­ber or dream of doing some­thing, or see­ing a thing or hear­ing a sound, mir­ror neurons […]

I was a deaf boy and the trees spoke to me. I walked through the woods at night. The wind rioted around me, pulling at leaves and branches, try­ing to tear the roots from the ground. The moon­light turned hard and thin. The air was cold with the salt spray from the bay. The trees moaned dully. […]

This photo sets my spine tin­gling. It’s hard to explain, but if you have the same reac­tion, you’ll get it. All those books! Worlds and worlds and worlds of imag­i­na­tion, places, things, moments, ideas, facts, sto­ries. Mas­sive, immo­bile, still…but the gan­glia of enchant­ment and dis­cov­ery. You can read about the project at the link below. […]