“Being alone lets you develop, become strange, be mad. If to be with people is to be socialized, to submit your rough edges to the whetstone of others’ desires, to be asocial is to be ragged and, thus, original.”
from Emily Cooke’s beautiful essay “The Lonely Ones,” on Sontag and loneliness
If you’re an artist, you’ve got to know about anger without being restricted by it. In order to create, you’ve got to have energy; you’ve got to have clarity. You’ve got to be able to catch ideas. You’ve got to be strong enough to fight unbelievable pressure and stress in this world. So it just makes sense to nurture the place where that strength and clarity and energy come from — to dive in and enliven that. It’s a strange thing, but it’s true in my experience: Bliss is like a flak jacket. It’s a protecting thing. If you have enough bliss, it’s invincibility. And when those negative things start lifting, you can catch more ideas and see them with greater understanding. You can get fired up more easily. You’ve got more energy, more clarity. Then you can really go to work and translate those ideas into one medium or another.
— DAVID LYNCH, from Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity
HOMESCHOOLING MOTHER OF 5, ALL THINGS DOMESTIC, MY CRAZY LIFE
poems, and the poet who poems them
Daily Discussions of craft and the writing life
It's always about writing...
Co-author of Mapping the Valley
Freelance Creative Professional
Writer * Editor * Educator * Weirdo
Lifesaving Poems
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(poetry and other stuff, but mostly poetry)
Just another WordPress.com site
a roominghouse for the servants of the duende
pea river journal 