Semi-Urban Cartography

* I use a few dictionary references. My New Comprehensive A-Z Crossword Dictionary is quite useful for abstractions both established and potential. For a thesaurus (of course) I use Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus (Updated & Expanded 3rd Edition). My basic dictionary is The Concise Oxford English Dictionary which I got for Christmas in 1996. Lastly, [...]

I spent most of this cold, fog laden Sunday morning in an attempt to reconcile old poetry. I keep a stack of pieces to reflect on close at hand in case their muse wants to bite again. It’s like so many ghost stories being retold. Frequently enough though the riddle has a way of unlocking [...]

As recently as Friday morning on this blog, I described on-going frustration with a game of “wait and see” that has taken over my creative life. Progress with a prospective agent has inadvertently led to stasis at the writing desk. Four treatments. A dozen poems. A few really promising short stories. None of them spark [...]

More than two months have passed. The weather has changed back into Autumn the season where it seems in perpetual returning. One more turn of the calendar and its into the holidays, sliding quickly into the end of the year benchmark. Time to know where have I been. I’ve found myself in this transition, waiting. [...]

They describe a quiet place. They would describe it as yours, somewhere comfortable and familiar. Your pens and pencils, paper taken from your drawer, your ream. They would say that this is the place. Arrive there early, in your time, ideally the same each morning before anyone else is awake. You will hear the garbage [...]

Returned home from Europe. Thirty-three years old, past the time in your life when going abroad to Italy and France can transform you. Hope is that amid all the lavish ruins of an old world, some of the wise antiquity will transfer. It’s why I steal touches of buttery marble in the long, lazily monitored [...]

In the mail yesterday I received a letter from the Deronda Review: they have decided to publish one of the poems I submitted back in March. The piece “A Self-Inflicted Famine” will appear in their next print issue. It’s an older poem, one I’ve cobbled together from some of my many fits and starts, formed [...]

If winter and spring are the set-up of the screenwriting season, middle summer is the pay-off. All the work and tending in the cold brings fruit. Seeing how how things have already started out in reaping 2009, it appears as though the climax will be another shuddering standstill. The Nichol Fellowship in screenwriting is the [...]