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Little Notebooks
I always carry a little notebook in my purse. Just in case. Sometimes I’ll carry the same one for years, if it doesn’t fill up fast. When my kids were younger, there would be tic-tac-toe games or weird scribbles on the middle pages, if I’d handed over the notebook in a desperate ploy to entertain…
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Summer Reading (I)
Not stacked in order. But summer’s just started, so I’ve just started reading. First Tumba de jaguares. This is my next translation, so this is a re-read. Here are the first two sentences: “Soñé que estaba en el cielo. No en El Cielo paraíso de almas bienaventuradas sino en el cielo, ese ¿élitro? azul celeste que oficialmente nos cubre, tanto para religiones…
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¿Cortadito o capuchino? I chose the wine
San Juan dispatch #1 In Puerto Rico for LASA 2015, talking and thinking about rewriting, adaptation, translation, performance, the borders (where are they?) between fiction and the real, on or off stage. Conversations enhanced (or reality stressed, or undermined) by the palm trees in the background, the ocean breeze, the ruined fort incongruously attched to…
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Cardinal Reflections
It’s a firebird, or maybe a flower. I was out cutting flowers early this morning, six a.m. and muggy in a way it seldom is in Oregon, or maybe my hurry just made it seem warm. And then I was looking for pictures of cardinals, and found instead reflected light on wood. Of course, there…
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Bookbinding II
Flush with my success in Bookbinding I, I enrolled in Bookbinding II. Some of us just don’t know how to get out of school. This project was more complicated: French stitch. More pages, more steps; linen tape and sewing weights. Books have bodies: head, tail, fore-edge, spine Folio = one sheet folded Signature =…
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What I’m Reading (mid-April)
April is the month of deadlines, of personnel reviews, of conference papers coming due, all of which a good book to come home to of an evening all the more important, even if I find myself reading in ten- or twelve-minute bursts. What I’m now reading, or what I just finished: Angélica Gorodischer’s Fábula de…
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And then when I wasn’t looking. . .
The prunes tree burst into bloom. Fat buds on Saturday, full blossoms on Thursday. With bees.
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Boxed Set, part II–memory stories in and out of the box
Literal Latté‘s spring 2015 issue is up–and with it my story, “Cloud Seeding in the Andes,” beautifully illustrated by Joseba Elorza. Coincidentally, today also marks 35 years since we returned to the US from that first trip to Ecuador–first for me, first that counts in memory–the trip that has served as springboard (nest, epicenter, scaffolding, excuse) for…
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Boxed set (stories in waiting)
Somewhere at the bottom of this stack of boxes is a stack of notebooks, detailed journals from trips to Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru. I know there are stories in them, waiting to be retrieved, rewound, reworded. Deciphered–I never won a penmanship prize. Embarrassing stories and clever observations and little aha! triumphs. I count them as…
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Pruning the Prunes Tree
For years, I called it a prune tree. And my Brooks prune, once it had been in the ground a while, obligingly provided a prune nearly every August. Maybe September. One prune. It dawned on me that perhaps I should call it a prunes tree. Much more obligingly (or equally obligingly, if we follow the…