Girl's gotta write

So, it's the first Sunday of February 2018 and the beginning of the second year of the administration of the Orange Man - and despite all my assurances to myself last year about getting back to more creative writing, it just didn't happen. Like a lot of people, I have struggled with where my writing goes next, what projects to complete, or to alter before submitting, how to really hear this moment in the culture, to penetrate it with all I know from my own life story and the wisdom simmering inside it all.

What is it I want or need to write now? Poetry abandoned me. While that is not my primary mode of writing, I found joy in it. The more I wrote poems, and then the more the poems started showing up, the more I felt poetry-writing to get a hold of me. Whether or not I am a decent poet, writing poems have made me a better writer.

Of martyrs, narrative, meaning, truth, and the craft of writing

Martyrs of the UCA in El Salvador

Today is an anniversary that marks murder and horror and the worst of U.S. imperial reach. On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests and a mother and daughter who had taken refuge from war on the campus of San Salvador's Central America University were gunned down by soldiers funded, armed, and trained by the United States. They were good men, these priests, brilliant scholars, courageous in the role they took on during their country's civil war, fiercely dedicated to the poor who were struggling in the face of enormous odds for their liberation from decades of US-supported dictatorship.

I mention this because this story, the story of Central America during the years of the liberation struggles, was the work of my life - for nearly 25 years. I used to write the stories.

Writing at the edge of the precipice

I've neglected this blog for a bit. Sorry 'bout that. It's not for lack of things to write about, probably more like too many things to write about - and that meets life and overwhelms. That's what it feels like these days.

I'm putting off a necessary tedious task to post this morning. The tedious task can wait.

Source: UNISYS, found at Capital Climate

It's been a bit warm across the nation, a bit crisp, a bit fiery, a bit stormy, a bit dry - unless you're in Duluth or Florida's panhandle. In these places it's the deluge. How about that 'derecho,' straight line winds up to 90 mph suddenly building and blowing from Indiana to Maryland!! Oh, and up north, the annual Arctic ice melt is already a record, and it's only June.