a pattern of fern shadows cast by candles playing into a snug culmination rented theaters where hillsides tottered in the unspoken gamble of her slightest motion, some indication if anyone commenced singing against the walls and ceiling of an unclothed expanse of potential a warm hand broaches, scratching its initials on frosted windows and then a lower back arched for precision a cappella with the choir we clocked a blizzard of treetop squirrels far below whatever our season and there you have it . tenderly
This round, I’m sticking close to home – places I return to.
My studio and loft.
Our Smoking Garden and adjacent fern beds, in season.
Our 1768 Quaker meetinghouse.
Dover’s indoor swimming pool downtown and its Olympic-size sister outdoors in Guppey Park, Portland Avenue. Gee, does that mean there’s actually a locker room or two as part of my favorites list? Let’s not slight the long, hot showers.
Annunciation Greek-Orthodox church. Visually stunning interior, for starters, and some fine folks.
Sander’s Theater at Harvard. Think of Shakespeare’s Globe and start adding on things like a ceiling.
The Maine coast, from the Isles of Shoals on up. Could lead to its own Tendrils entry.
The Community Trail running through town and out along the river.
The waterfalls downtown. Always changing.
Lickee’s and Chewy’s Candies & Creamery in the Cocheco Millworks.
~*~
Tell us something about one of your own favorites.
Unless you’re a hermit or a successful recluse, you’re bound to come across a host of humanity in your daily life. Just think of the spaces you inhabit — home, neighborhood, buses or subway cars, classroom, workplace and markets, church, a gym or swimming pool, dances, sports teams or choirs, coffee stop, and on and on — all filled with other people who cross your path.
Just mapping all the places you touch in a week can be a big challenge.
If it were only pink, like the one in my novel What’s Left!
So faithfully following a character in a story presents an impossible task: how many of these intersecting individuals can an author include? Think, too, of the level of importance — whether you’re presenting a central figure whose influence runs through many of the pages; a major character who may be important at some point, even a single chapter; someone who provides peripheral color; an episodic figure, who flits in and out. And how many of these require names versus those who can be quickly sketched by a simple title or description?
I’d still love to do a tale having only two characters. Even holding it to six would be fun. But obviously, that wouldn’t do when the story touches up to five generations, as my novel What’s Left, does. Now you can share my perspective.
Consider, too, that we typically know others in one circle of activity or another. Sometimes they fit in several, but encountering a person out of context can be confusing. There are people I know at the indoor swimming pool, for instance, but we’re always startled when we run into each other on the street or at the supermarket, where our joke usually goes, “I didn’t recognize you with your clothes on!” (Yes, we do wear swimsuits — and often swim caps.)
How many people do you know by name? What’s your most important social space when it comes to being with your cohorts?
Just don’t throw everything on the brush pile and torch it quite yet. Just one item at a time, recalling its place in the journey.
~*~
As for syllables, may I suggest singing, something without words. Just open your mouth and dance with the breeze or still air as it will. Like incense, an offering and invitation to the Spirit.
The gap between well-crafted prose, especially fiction, drama, or comedy, and the art of poetry has long tempted and then eluded writers. The definition of poetry as “slow prose” further complicates the issue, I suppose, although some see that end of the spectrum as limp verse – many elements make poetry, after all, and can take a piece far from simple conversation or logical progression. Just because something is structured in broken lines doesn’t raise it to music.
Well, that does point to the appearance of rap as standing somewhere between poetry and fully developed music, rather than chanting or a rhythm section … and opera did emerge out of an attempt to recover the tonal nature of ancient Greek language.
So the possibilities of the genre of prose poems stand as a provocation, and the trials can fascinate. As a rule, I’ve found shorter is sweeter – around a hundred words, max, lest you start writing paragraphs and the piece at hand lose its energy.
This year the Red Barn will be presenting a prose poem each Saturday, drawing on a collection published in 2018 at Thistle Finch. I am grateful to the editors of the following journals for giving some of the prose poems their first airing: Bounce Is Bard, Crack the Spine, Jerseyworks, Ray’s Road Review, Red Coral, The Screech Owl, The Singularity Review, Souvenir Lit Journal, Subliminal Interiors, and The Vein.
Most of them arise from correspondence in my years before relocating to the New Hampshire seacoast and thus represent events now somewhere back in my foggy past. The persons they’re addressed to in these whirlwinds are abstractions, more than actual individuals. What I do know is that I could not create these works today, my outlook is so different.
and so having examined his cards she shot off fireworks from a waist-high bank of snowy night bottle rockets, the progression silence – whoosh – bang! in some bereavement overcome by momentary pyrotechnics in a furtive event, just once and it’s over who knows how she added fractions to appropriate repeated waves of painters, musicians, singers while he saved five years for some overcast studies prowling the night trajectories into hooting night forest only to detect he has zero bearing as a nightmare impostor posted KEEP OUT and call it quits, entering darkness Better luck next time
Safe to say, it’s been unlike any 12 months before it.
A hunkered-down lifestyle. Shelter-in-place and other Covid-19 social measures. (OK, we all have that much in common.)
Learned to Zoom. But it’s not the same as face-to-face meetings.
Tripped over my wife more than usual. More likely, found myself appearing unintentionally in her Zoom meetings.
Appreciated a six-hour Smashwords writers’ conference online back in April. Those folks are amazing. Which leads to …
Saw my novels become available in paperback at Amazon. Eight of them! Alas, book signings are still on hold, as are public readings.
Missed having weekly choir practice, my daily laps swimming, and in-person Quaker worship and committee work together.
Watched a lot of Met opera streaming. A different performance every night (or sometime during the following day, depending on my schedule). More than a hundred different works, in addition to the same pieces in different productions or castings.
Returned to the workplace, part-time, as a Census enumerator. We were supposed to start in May, but that got pushed back to August before being cut a month short. Don’t be surprised if it has to be redone in two years.
Missed the Greek community, Orthros and the festival, especially.
Drank too many martinis.
~*~
I’m not counting the big move, which really fits more into the coming year. For now, it’s feeling more like acquiring a summer home, except that our adventure starts in winter.
Frankly, I can do without all of the secular holiday music, or at least most of it. I want something less contrived and commercial. Even Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker score wears thin.
I’m not entirely insensitive, though. Here are ten I enjoy singing, especially in a choir.
~*~
People, Look East: this 1928 Advent carol by Eleanor Farjeon is a joyous accompaniment when making preparations ahead of Christmas.
In the Bleak Midwinter: I want to think of this as a plaintive folksong, but the words are by Christina Rossetti and the music’s by English master Gustav Holst. It catches the blue side of the approaching winter, but also the hope and comfort to be found therein.
Once in Royal David’s City: If you can, go for the fully celebrative midnight mass with a full pipe organ and all five verses sung in the Anglican style that alternates soft and loud.
There Are Angels Hovering Round: It’s an old call-and-response hymn that seems to have hundreds of verses, if you want to keep going. There’s no escaping the sense of togetherness when you’re singing.
Fairest and Brightest (Star of the East): I first heard this in a recording by Kentucky folksinger Jean Ritchie, but it also works in formal arrangements. The text is a protest song befitting the suffering classes of the story.
Nouvelle Agreable: by Swiss composer Jean-Georges Nageli, the bouncy music almost sounds like Mozart though even Native Americans near the Arctic will sing and dance to it, too. (Check it out on YouTube.)
La Valse Cadienne de Noel: words and music by Jeannette V. Aguillard. What, you don’t waltz during the Twelve Days of Christmas?
Traveler’s Carol: A traditional Catalan carol of coming together for the holiday. We use English by Susan Cooper in an arrangement by George Emlen.
The Coventry Carol: a haunting sense of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and of the crucifixion to come infuse this lullaby.
The Old Year is Dying: a cheerful Welsh piece to welcome the New Year. Again, New Year’s Day falls in the Twelve Days.
Jnana's Red Barn 