Apr 29
Lest the last post be too disparaging about fairy tale ladies in iffy marriage situations, let me bring a seriously rad lady to your attention: SHAHRAZAD, heroine of The Arabian Nights So here’s the deal with The Arabian Nights: it’s one large frame story with several smaller frame stories grouped inside of it. Tales within tales within …
Apr 16
So, Disney Princess movies. I know you have a range of feelings and thoughts conjured by the term. In our culture, whether it’s nostalgia, irritation, boredom, hatred, glee, adoration, or nausea, Disney Princess movies probably mean something to you. And I’ve got to take down everyone’s favorite darling today, my friends. The one that people …
Mar 18
Let me tell you about them. Because, thing is, they are where all the bad-ass women of fairy tales have been hiding all this time. First, the basics: Compiled by Francis James Child in the mid to late 1800s, the full title is actually The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, and it is a collection of …
Jan 26
After exhaustive research, I have come to the following conclusion: swans are creep-ass. I think swans are physically weird. This is a totally personal bias based on me being terrified of geese as a small child. My preschool had a farm right next to it, and geese (and once, a cow) would sometimes escape into …
Jan 16
Here is an erasure poem I did in my writing group a while ago. I found it while cleaning up paperwork on my desk. It came from an article about football. Football is not where it ended up. Here’s the text if I were to format it like a poem: Every shudder of injury for …
Jan 14
Dear Internet, I went to Vermont! It was strategic. For those of you who do not know and/or are too lazy to look two posts back where I talked about it, I am a candidate for a Master’s of Fine Arts in Writing at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT. This means once a semester I …
Feb 17
Listening and transcribing these tapes is a trip, I tell you what. For one thing, one of the wonderful people whom I interviewed is now dead of cancer, which is a sobering thought. For another, listening to myself at age twenty is fascinating. Six years ago, the summer I got the grant to do the …
Feb 04
Part Two: Success At twenty…oh god. At twenty, success meant that I could make it through the month on my budget of $150 and I wasn’t hungry. That’s what success was then. Budget was $150, it started at $120 and went up to $150 a month, for everything. For rent, food books, entertainment, you name …
Feb 02
I am fifty-two years old—not sure how I got here. I am a therapist, and I also write, and I also do a lot of work for the courts as a special advocate, as a clinical evaluator, as a collaborative law divorce coach, as a child specialist. I think I got my earliest training at …
Feb 01
Dante’s concept of paradise is like a rose–earth in the center, with concentric heavenly spheres radiating outward like petals on a rose. All of the heavenly spheres have a planetary theme: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun (yes, it was the 1300s and Dante was a poet), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the “fixed stars”, i.e. the …