Dark blue Morning Glory
Light blue Morning Glories
Morning glory, what’s your story?
Filed under Photo by author, Photo Finish Friday
Your lips renounce me. /
Still, I kiss their feathered tips. /
The edges of flesh.
Filed under Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author, Uncategorized
by Sue Zalokar
“Well, imagination is based on experience. The way everything in the world is made out of the elements combined in endless ways, everything in the mind is made out of bits of experienced reality combined in endless ways. So a child’s imagination deepens with living, with wider experience of reality. And so does a writer’s.”
–Ursula K. LeGuin
Source: http://news.streetroots.org/2014/08/14/otherworldly-and-utterly-portland-ursula-k-le-guin
Ursula K. Le Guin started writing when she was five and has been publishing her work since the 1960s. Throughout her career, she has delved into some of the most insightful, political, ecological and socially important topics of our time. She has created utopian worlds and utopian societies. She boldly challenged gender barriers by simply doing what she was born to do: write.
Her first major work of science fiction, “The Left Hand of Darkness,” is considered epoch-making in the field for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. At a time when women were barely represented in the writing world, specifically in the genre of Science Fiction, Le Guin was taking top honors for her novels. Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and among the many honors she has earned, her writing has received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards.
In Paris in 1953 she married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, and since 1958 they have lived in Portland. They have three children and four grandchildren.
After some correspondence, Le Guin invited me to her home to talk. I arrived bearing fresh-picked berries from Sauvie Island. She took me into her study and showed me the view she had of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Sue Zalokar: I can only imagine. I don’t know much about the history of the eruption. Did you have much warning?
U.K.L.: There was lots of warning. The mountain had been rumbling and shaking and dumping black matter on her snow all spring. It was really bad luck. They thought she’d gone into a sort of a quiet phase and so they told people they could go that weekend to their cabins, run in and get their belongings out. Well, that was the weekend she blew. So that’s why there were 60 to 70 people killed. You can’t predict a volcano.
I got really fascinated with the volcano. About a year and few months after the eruption, the whole mountain was called “The Red Zone.” You could go part way up and then above that, you had to have a permit to go in and the only people that were going in were loggers dragging dead trees out. The roads were destroyed, there were just logging roads. Me, a photographer and an artist, got a permit to go in (to the Red Zone) as a poet, a photographer and an artist.
S.Z.: Awesome.
U.K.L.: How about that? I hardly ever pull strings, but we pulled a few and we got a day pass into the Red Zone. We drove around in this awful, unspeakable landscape of ash. Nothing but ash and dead trees. And the trees, just like grey corpses, all pointing the same direction where the blast of the eruption blew them down.
Well, imagination is based on experience. The way everything in the world is made out of the elements combined in endless ways, everything in the mind is made out of bits of experienced reality combined in endless ways. So a child’s imagination deepens with living, with wider experience of reality. And so does a writer’s.Twenty-five years later, a few years ago, I went back to that same area, which they thought would take at least 100 years to come back and regrow. It’s all green. There are trees coming up and flowers blooming like mad, birds, deer, elk. That mountain, she makes herself over and over. It’s quite a story.
S.Z.: Was there a specific piece of writing that came out of that experience in the Red Zone?
U.K.L.: Yes. I wrote poems called “In the Red Zone” and I wrote a piece with the same title.
S.Z.: What distinguishes experience from imagination in writing and is one more essential to the process of writing than the other?
The rest of the interview at: http://news.streetroots.org/2014/08/14/otherworldly-and-utterly-portland-ursula-k-le-guin
Filed under Writing Tip Wednesday
It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.
Filed under Monday morning writing humor
Bill Murray Gives a Delightful Dramatic Reading of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1996) | Open Culture.
Mark Twain
Just above see Murray read an excerpt from American great Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Murray’s appearance at the 1996 Barnes & Noble event apparently came as a surprise to the audience—and to himself. The excerpt he reads might also surprise many readers of Twain’s classic, who probably won’t find it in their copies of the novel. These passages were originally published in Life on the Mississippi but reinserted—“correctly, I guess,” Murray shrugs—into Huck Finn in Random House’s 1996 republication of the novel, marketed as “the only comprehensive edition.” (Read a publication history and summary of the changes in this brief, unsympathetic review of the re-edited text.)
1996 was an interesting year for Twain’s novel. Long at the center of debates over racial sensitivity in public education, and banned many times over, the book figured prominently that year in a tense but fruitful meeting between parents and teachers in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. These discussions produced a new curricular approach that PBS outlines in its teaching guide “Huck Finn in Context,” which offers a variety of responses to the thorny pedagogy of “the ‘n’ word,” racial stereotyping, and reading satire. Beyond the issue of derogatory language, there also arose that year a pugnacious challenge to the book’s place in the American literary canon from novelist Jane Smiley. Smiley’s polemic prompted a lengthy rebuttal in The New York Times from Twain scholar Justin Kaplan.
[Editor’s note: the over hour-long video contains much more than Murray’s reading and is worth watching for its own merits and authors on the panel.]
Filed under Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
“Get up in the air you gas bag and fight like a balloon!”
Filed under Photo by author, Photo Finish Friday
Haze lingers like fog /
translucent upon your lips /
passion unspoken.
Filed under Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author
Space really was the final frontier. Who knew you could find it in an oven?
Filed under cartoon by author, CarToonsday
Three writers are sitting at a bar. It’s the first time they’ve met.
After a drink or two, the first writer turns to the others at the bar and says, “I had a strange dream last night.”
The second writer asked, “How strange was it?”
“Well, the first writer says, “I dreamed I went to Hell and a lot of famous writers were there. You know, Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Albert Camus.”
“Really,” says the second writer. “I dreamed I went to Heaven and a lot of famous writers were there. You know, C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, John Bunyan.”
When he didn’t say anything, they asked the third writer, who said, “I dreamed I was in a bar with two other writers.”
The next night the three writers met again at the bar.
The first writer said, “I dreamed I was in Heaven, and I saw all those writers you mentioned.”
The second writer said, “I dreamed I was in Hell, and I saw all those writers you mentioned.”
Then they turned to the third writer sitting between them. He took a sip of his drink and shrugged his shoulder, “I dreamed I was in a bar with two other writers.”
After another drink, they started talking about their work.
“I’m a crime writer,” said the first writer.
“I’m a romance writer,” said the second writer.
They then turned to third writer who sighed and said, “I’m a travel writer.”
Filed under Monday morning writing joke
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