There is a new book out from Shambala Publications: On Being Stuck: Tapping into the Creative Power of Writer’s Block by Laraine Herring. Her approach is one of “making friends with your stuck places,” with a great tag line, “We will see windows where we once saw only walls.” I love to write. There are other activities that make me happy, but when I am able to write about something that interests me, my life has a purpose which gives me a deep feeling of satisfaction. But most of the time, I don’t write. I blame my lack of writing on various things: procrastination, laziness, ineptitude, getting side-tracked. These cause me to lose my curiosity, which is my prime motivator, the aspect of being alive that makes me start writing. Procrastination: I used to be the opposite of a procrastinator. I finished my term papers at school within days of the assignment. I never stayed up late to finish a paper. My anxiety about getting it done spurred me on to complete the writing as fast as possible, because only then could I breathe a sigh of relief. Over the years I have become really good at procrastinating when it comes to writing. My favorite excuse lately is “good weather.” Beautiful sunny days are rare enough where I live (Ithaca, NY) that when the weather is good, I feel I have to take advantage of it by going outside – gardening, a walk, birding, biking. I have a laptop but it’s hard…
An endless loop of images, sounds, and events play in the theatre of my horrified mind. Specific details brand themselves red hot into memory. The hour, the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade before it happened replay backward and forward as my mind searches for clues to the mystery of my lover’s suicide two years ago. As a reader, I rode a… [Read More]
Filed Under: Atria, History of a Suicide, Ithaca, Jill Bialosky, Suicide Prevention and Crisis Services, WW Norton
No Comments
This is the second “Featured Local Bookstores” post that has focused on a bookstore located in downtown Ithaca’s Dewitt Mall. Until 2006, The Bookery and Buffalo Street Books used to be known as Bookery I and Bookery II. Now, however, it is the only bookery in town that offers “an extensive selection of used and rare books, available in our store and online at thebookery.com…. [Read More]
Filed Under: antiquarian, Buffalo Street Books, collector, For the Love of Books, going local, Ithaca, The Bookery
It’s tough to keep track of activity on the Twitterverse sometimes. This is how Twitter, or social media in general, draws you in and sucks away your time. The drawback of live streaming, immediately accessible social and media platforms is just that: it’s 24 hours, it’s always on. Inevitably, logging off Twitter means checking out from social media and missing out on conversation points, interesting… [Read More]
“A novel, biography, and memoir, all/three going at once.” This is how Kirsten Wasson describes her mother’s voracious literary appetite in the poem “One Way to Read.” The two lines, however, could well have been written to describe the author’s new collection of poems, Almost Everything Takes Forever, published by Antrim House Books. It is a lush, lithe, witty, emotionally frank series of postcards from… [Read More]
Filed Under: Antrim House Books, Elizabeth Bishop, fernweh, Kirsten Wasson, manuscripts, new releases, poetry, Rennie McQuilkin
Austin hosted the 16th Texas Book Festival at the state capitol building October 22-23 with 250 authors presenting and 35,000 in attendance. Los Angeles may boast the much larger Los Angeles Times Festival of Book, which attracts as many as 140,000 visitors; but when you compare LA’s population of 9.8 million to Austin’s 800,000, you see that Austin pulled off a bigger, per capita turn out…. [Read More]