drmstream[writing]

  What I see clearly I pass by. What I see but do not see, I stand to wit­ness. My heart goes wan­der­ing, pulls my soul from its slum­ber, pesters mem­o­ries to give up their hard, wary shell and stretch out in child­like glee. All while I stand cap­tive to what I see but do not see. Then […]

Secrets are dan­ger­ous things. My grand­mother hid behind her secrets. She car­ried them every­where. When she fought with my mother, she’d sit on the couch look­ing shat­tered. “It isn’t that bad, grandma,” I’d say.  She’d look away, whis­per­ing in a quaky voice, ‘You can’t know how bad it is, Danny,’. When I got older and […]

  It started when I butted in on a Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion between @juanviejo and @susanchamplin, two peo­ple I enjoy­ing fol­low­ing.  They’d been dis­cussing com­mence­ment addresses made by David Fos­ter Wal­lace and Jonathan Franzen. I came in strong, shoot­ing for con­cise and emphatic with my two-Tweet attack. being utterly aware of human­ness doesn’t have to cause pain. […]

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 […]

He was a vio­lent man inca­pable of being faith­ful ton his wife. He was also para­noid. Those qual­i­ties doomed their mar­riage. Feb­ru­ary 17, 2011 5:19 pm via Twit­te­la­torReplyRetweetFavorite @drmstream drm­stream When you tell a story on Twit­ter, you assem­ble it into 140 char­ac­ter or fewer bits and dis­trib­ute it into the stream.  It is different […]

In the 10 years since my dad died, my life has changed in ways nei­ther of us antic­i­pated. I want to turn toward new things with him today. Decem­ber 6, 2010 2:19 pm via Twit­te­la­torReplyRetweetFavorite @Kcecelia Kather­ine Cecelia This day before Christ­mas is filled with antic­i­pa­tion and uncer­tainty. The gifts are assem­bled, the rit­u­als lined […]

Forty-eight days, ninety-four thou­sand and one hun­dred and sev­enty words. One novel done and the other half done. When I started, I had about 14,000 words of a novel that I had been research­ing and for­mu­lat­ing for more than a year. I didn’t feel the kind of momen­tum that told me the book was going to find […]

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 […]

When I take a pho­to­graph, I’m look­ing for the light. Then, as I retouch it, I’m look­ing for the impres­sion. What I want to accom­plish is to recre­ate the sen­sa­tion when we look at some­thing quickly and are left with equal parts dis­tinct and indis­tinct per­cep­tion. The meld­ing of the two states cre­ates an impression […]