On Searching for a More Apt Word Than FAIL: A Substitute and Not a Synonym

Time is up. NaNoWriMo has ended. December 1st has passed. We survived. And this, this is the story of survival. Survival begins much uglier than you might think. It begins with guilt and shame and a desire to fade into the white and the flurry of fragments — of self and storyline and understanding. The [...]

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Hidden Cache of Lost Marbles

Where did I put my marbles this weekend? For starters, Berns and I signed up for NaNoWriMo, which if you haven’t heard about is probably the most intimidating bout of dedicated self-torture through literary explosion I’ve heard of and knowingly, even excitedly, volunteered for!  NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month and it takes place [...]

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Are we still unfledged?

The guillemot (a European bird much like Bernsie, herself) hurls itself off a precipice before it is fully fledged, not as a test of will or wings, but as an instinctual following act just a few steps behind its mother.  And the fledgling guillemot doesn’t stick the landing.  It doesn’t even fly.  The guillemot feels [...]

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October’s Eye

“A child looking at ruins grows younger but cold and wants to wake to a new name I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring walnut and may leaves the color of shoulders at the end of summer a month that has been to the mountain and become light there [...]

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A Polemic on Listmaking

We are, between us, the following: One world traveler/grad-student-to-be/post-Brookylnite/post-post-Baltimorean/canvas shoe wearer/fledgling orthalogian/daily consumer of Americanized Mexican food One domestic cat-lady-in-waiting/psychiatric rehabilitation specialist/counselor/fledgling harpist/wannabe philatelist/incredibly redundant wordsmith/potential theology student We are both cheeky. And avid coffee swindlers. And, of course, obsessive list-makers. Once in a seminar/training, titled “Therapeutic Crisis Intervention: The Cornell Model,” I was asked [...]

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