At heart, I will always be a midwestern girl.  I grew up in the Midwest (Indiana to be exact) and except for a brief sojourn in the American South for college, I have always lived here.

Early this month, I participated in an exercise at a conference where… Read full post »

I’ve been in Greece for the last two and a half days, and have been trying to get the hang of its pace.  I’ve known this pace before in Mexico, but as an American, it’s so damned drummed into my head that I need… Read full post »

 A"gite" (guesthouse) at the Roy Hart Centre Artistique, Internationale in France

I'm currently in France teaching and studying the voice work of the Roy Hart Theater.  During my voice lesson today I had the same trouble I had in a class last year with world renouned voice te… Read full post »

^{I am back in France, living and working in a 300 year-old chateau.  This is today's story....}

Last night as I was washing dishes, the faucet of the sink in my little pod-kitchen flew off its fastenings and I had a little fountain in my kitchen.  I shut… Read full post »

^dispatch.com

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio. *

My father was standing in the kitchen, dialing the rotary phone.  His eyes were intense and his face was dark with fury.

“Western Union? … Read full post »

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Thank you Silkstone, for this open call regarding not necessarily our favorite books, but the ones that were most influential in our lives.  It's a wonderful self-reflection exercise and I'm looking foward to what the lists will tell us about their bloggers.

The On… Read full post »

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The sun has been shining for four days straight, which is saying a lot for February in Cleveland.  During those four days so little has happened, and yet so much.  I feel a bit as though I’m stepping outside of myself in a third-person rever… Read full post »

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The sea is glinting silver and the air is hot and the sand is like fire under my feet. I race to the water and suddenly I am liquid and cool and swimming in the crater left when the meteor struck and killed the dinosaurs.

And the water… Read full post »

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Dear Woman in Front of me in the Check Out Line at Giant Eagle:

First of all, I take all responsibility for THE INCIDENT.  We were, after all, in the “self-service” line.  I should have understood that “self service” was to… Read full post »

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When is the earliest memory of misogyny in my life?

Like Deborah Young, I don’t have memories of a first misogynist moment.  I was raised in its swamp.  My mother, a rural child of the Depression, nursed me on it.  By the time… Read full post »

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I have trudged there through the crackling frozen snow, blind with fever from the flu.  Or inhaled the scent of a spring evening while walking there, as I contemplated a love story well-told. I have searched there for answers to the human condition, sometimes find… Read full post »

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Today is the last Sunday in Advent, traditionally a season of “waiting for the light to come.”  In most of the Northern Hemisphere it is a time of frozen hibernation; trees stark against grey skies, grasses hoary white with frost, animals sleeping nose to tail in… Read full post »

Ah, que la vie est quotidienne.  _{Jules Laforgue}

I’ve been spending a great deal of time in the last few months contemplating the passage between the last bloom of adulthood and post-middle-age. I am turning fifty soon, and although the actual number doesn’t trouble m… Read full post »

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This post is really not a literary discussion.  I hope you will bear with its short introduction.

In one of my classes we are reading and discussing Jonathan Safron Foer’s first book, Everything is Illuminated.  (It’s a brilliant, hilarious book,&… Read full post »

 Topic:

Mad Men

I took a little hike today, and thought some of y'all might like to come along...

a riot of yellows against an azure sky

an impressionist view

The harvest is over

Farmwork almost done

The Wabash river slows… Read full post »

When I was in my late twenties, I met a group of like-minded friends through church. Eventually we all got fed up with the patriarchic small-minded madness of our elderly pastor, and our group became our “church,” meeting once a week, where we shared our lives, our hopes… Read full post »

I saw this little lady in my grape vine munching on a honey bee.  I watched her as she cleaned every morsel off of her front legs.  Her lunch was over by the time I came back with the camera.

photo © voicegal 2009 Read full post »

My father is awakened by the cats at 5 AM.  They knead his stomach, anxious for their daily dose of fishy-smelling cat food.  There are five of them; he was not particularly a “cat person” before his wife collected them.  She had always been jealous of his r… Read full post »

I always get a little sad this time of year.  I usually credit it to the changes in the light; by this time in Cleveland we’ve lost the hazy white gaze of summer, the days are noticeably shorter, and our long, frigid, unrelenting winter is on the horizon.  Or,… Read full post »

Thought you might like to meet one of the visitors to my garden today!

And a shot of the whole glorious plot:

Happy Summer! Read full post »