• Thoughts & Quotes

    How to Swim an Elegy

    A 20-year-old orca, known as Tahlequah, gave birth to a female calf on July 24. The baby orca died only a few minutes later. Keeping the calf’s lifeless body afloat atop her head, Tahlequah swam through choppy seas for more than two weeks. *** HOW TO SWIM AN ELEGY by Craig van Rooyen This is a job for your barnacle-wrecked body. Grief, it turns out, is too much for the mind. It enervates the yellowed enamel of your ground-down molars; chafes at the skin sack separating your water from the world’s water. Keep your chin up. Not because the sympathy cards tell you to, but because the horizon’s gone, replaced…

  • Thoughts & Quotes

    Jabberwocky

    One of the few poems I’ve committed to memory. Go figure. Jabberwocky By Lewis Carroll ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!” He took his vorpal sword in hand; Long time the manxome foe he sought— So rested he by the Tumtum tree And stood awhile in thought. And, as in uffish thought he stood, The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, And burbled as it came!…

  • Thoughts & Quotes

    Alan Watts says…

    Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say… for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. ~ Alan Watts

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    Steve Adams says…

    You write your stories. You produce your [poetry]. If this is who you are, this is how you get to be you, and that’s where almost all the joy of a life in the arts lies. Your projects develop lives of their own, or they don’t. Regardless, you’re part of something bigger. You live your life serving something bigger, so you get to be bigger, as well as true to that thing deep inside you that always called, even as people tried to run you off of it. You get to serve that. What more could you ask for in this world? -Steve Adams

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    Clean Later

    I’ve seen women insist on cleaning everything in the house before they could sit down to write… and you know it’s a funny thing about housecleaning… it never comes to an end. Perfect way to stop a woman. A woman must be careful to not allow over-responsibility (or over-respectabilty) to steal her necessary creative rests, riffs, and raptures. She simply must put her foot down and say no to half of what she believes she “should” be doing. Art is not meant to be created in stolen moments only. ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés Artist photo: Helen Frankenthaler circa 1956

  • Thoughts & Quotes

    What Art Is

    For those of us who give our lives to it, for those of us whose lives were, at some time and in some way, saved by Art, whether music, literature, or another art form, art is much more than entertainment or something to make the walls look pretty. It’s what everything else is for. -Neil Gaiman