this is the great north of my life
including mosquitos
I wouldn’t want to go on a typical
ship cruise
or Navy vessel
the sea’s so blue with a sky to match
in the zodiac, I’m an air sign
My visual therapy
the North Atlantic at night
a distant lighthouse here and there
the Milky Way
dawn where I live
Considering historical accuracy, too
The two small dormers in the front bedroom were more of a pain to remove than you’d expect. That part was labor intensive, and they weren’t even braced to handle the weight load of the rafters above them. No, those had merely been sawed off. We have no idea how the heavy slate roofing that came later didn’t crush everything beneath it. (I’ll save that history for later.)
The dormers apparently weren’t added until after 1850, anyway. (Again, an explanation that can wait for later.)
The cedar-shake siding came even later, maybe the early 1990s. For a while before that, it was green asphalt siding. Yes, like what you might see on a roof.
The house color by 1830 was yellow, though we haven’t yet found any evidence of that.
All of that gives us more leeway for redesign, no?
With the front of the house, we’re keeping the outermost panels of the original roofline in recognition of the Cape Cod style. In the renovation, though, we still needed to upgrade the support beneath them, even before replacing the roof covering.
The dormers, by the way, were not identically distanced from the ends of the house. There was a half-foot or so difference. Did they not have tape measures? Make that yardsticks?
The single, big dormer will be a dramatic change, inside and out.
Here it comes!
Our wine bar on the waterfront
The Phoenix has a devoted following and some fine views.
When a fictional scene can use a shot of reality
While I’m thinking about visuals, let me mention a few ways they’ve helped me in creating my novels.
Not to slight dialogue, even when you nail it, or, for that matter, narrative, but a visual detail can be a great way to spark attention in a character development or a scene. It can make a passage visceral. It can rescue a connecting passage that’s gone flat or leaving you floundering for just the right idea.
I don’t know about you, but my memory overlooks a lot of telling specifics in the history I’m investigating. It’s not just memory, either, but so much that should be obvious but we simply block from awareness. That’s where I’ve found photographs to be a great prompt. Sometimes they even provide data, as my Orphan George blog demonstrates in posts examining family photos, when they’ve been available. Other genealogists can weigh in on ways snapshots and portraits have provided crucial data.
Through many of my moves, I didn’t even have a camera. I have no shots of many of the people who were central in my life, not even some of the lovers or places I’ve inhabited. The shots can counter my tendency to idealize. A bit of grit can restore some reality.
In the process of writing and revising my novels, I began collecting photos from magazines or other sources as prompts. This character in my book (often they’re a compression of several real people) might look like the one in this photo or wear something in that. Or here’s a small-town square that would work. They even allowed me to reconstruct a darkroom for Kenzie.
The Internet, of course, has made this backgrounding much easier.
Let’s call it Key East
Eastport’s tourism buoy is inspired by the Key West landmark in Florida.
Force does not make right
… in politics as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1
Come along on a funky little camping trip with me
Maybe if I had a camera at the time, the trip would have wound up as photos rather than a poem. The weeklong camping trip was a turning point in my life, though, and the poem that emerged from the experience was initially accepted by a prestigious Northwest literary press but then declined – they’d lost a grant, they said.
Had it appeared at the time, my path as a poet would have advanced, definitely more securely than it did. But the effort definitely solidified my growth in the craft.
Poem? It’s my attempt at what William Carlos Williams advocated as a longpoem, where the challenge is “to find an image large enough to embody the whole knowable world about me.” About, in this case, having meanings as both the immediate world around the poet and his own autobiographical revelations. In his case, the image was the Paterson, New Jersey, the river city where he practiced medicine and lived.
For me, it became about the Olympic Peninsula of the Pacific Northwest, bugged, perhaps, by Basho’s wanderings in ancient Japan.
Having originally appeared in Thistle Finch editions, this collection is now available on your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.
Do take a look.
Burger loaded
Confession. I rarely eat hamburger. Maybe it’s a vestige of my stretches of being vegetarian or even the tasteless rock-hard patties we had when growing up. If I eat beef, give me a thick medium-rare steak or juicy roast, at least.
But once or twice a year, I’ll definitely go for something like this. Especially while traveling.
Upper Kennebec
Even a mighty river has humble beginnings.
Jnana's Red Barn 