Sourdough Sunday

Breakfast of Champions

So Fine

Putting the F in it.*

You may now refer to me as Master, once again.

*For Fine. Why? What did you think I meant?

MFA Graduation

Sourdough Friday

Manuscript Day

The manuscript is submitted.

After all day editing -- I'm just going to give it one quick look-- it was suddenly 5 o'clock, and I was spent.

Off it goes, while I recover in the tub.

The Blade

Neil Gaiman: American Gods

I was overdue for a second reading of American Gods, and I loved this revisiting as much now as the first time, years ago.

One of my favorite aspects of this novel is that the Land itself is the god in America; everyone else is an immigrant. 

Sunday: Sourdough and Writing

Tiu is hard at work going over my edits as I take the bread from the oven.

Station Eleven: Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, set in a world a generation after apocalyptic flu erases modern society as we know it, is not a straightforward apocalypse novel. The wholesale removal of civilization as we know it is the conceit that allows her to explore what rebuilding looks like, and how we interact with ourselves and each other in a non-electrical life. 

The writing is graceful, elegant, and tender without triteness. The reader feels invited to walk with these characters, and I felt a tenderness toward them, exposed as flawed and human and beautiful. This is not a lecture on civilization and its discontents, but a gentle revelation of people in relationship with themselves and each other. 

The result is an elegant rendering of the interwoven nature of relationships and how small things, especially living our art, have such a meaningful and lasting impact on lives we glance through. What has power in the book are the acts of living in creativity -- the gift if the paperweight, the act of putting on a play or making music, the drawing of a story. These are the things that change others, even if we never see how they are changed, and they are the ways by which the characters know themselves. Art connects us to love and to each other. Through the pain, through the mistakes, through the inconveniences and difficulties of daily life.

Because survival is insufficient.

Welcome Home, Little Dog

Sabbatical

Dawn

The View From Here

Level

The Age of May

Having survived the perpetuity of March and come through the Pink eon of April, the age of May seems to be whizzing by.

Sourdough

Who needs yeast?

The sourdough starter was ready, so I whipped up a batch of whole wheat bread. I love working with

 sourdough -- the texture is soothing and centering, and the Tang is a comfort as my it's released during kneading.

Letting it cool completely is the hardest step.

Second Law

Second law

Samiya Bashir

Who was warned about these things:

the neverhush, the maddening chafe

sliding down a reddened bridge, print

disappearing            disappearing?

Who was told how to brook it?

The houndstooth stench of olding.

That time just runs itself out. That

we Sisyphus ourselves to glasses,

hobble wreckage down stair

after bricky stair. 

That once we leave home—its gaseous

oven—that once we walk the same slow

steps as our hide-and-seek sun that

once we face our anti-lovers’ anti-gaze:

bright, open, later, now eyes smoldered

coats swept open to flash our own

scarred bellies our own hot hands

ablaze with spent matches with burnt-out

love —

Remember love? 

How it loosed its jaw to our kisses?

How it unhinged us? How it tried us 

like so many keys like so many rusted

locks? How it missed its target despite its

kicking? How maybe its force could kill us?

Without it what’s left day after day

to trundle our legs? What’s left to push

breath ragged and torn from our lungs?

Who was warned

how these solar winds would leave us

brown and bruised as apples over-

-ripe host and blowsy      seed dis-

appearing     disappearing?

Were you?

Me too.

Life is a circle

Life is a circle.
The end of one journey is the beginning of the next.