Memoirous

I wonder if my readers (both of you) ever get tired of reading my minutia. A cardinal, the sun—it’s making a comeback!—all are about nothing. Pretty much the stuff of real life—when we decide to get off social media. I know, I know. It’s tough these days. But let me tell you about walking to the composter. When we got the spaceship-looking contraption we pondered where to place it. We determined the farthest corner of the back yard was best, so that if it smelled (all that rotting compost) it wouldn’t offend. So now I have to tromp across unbroken snow, the tops of my boots barely sticking out, in the freezing cold to the composter with my little buckets. It seemed reasonable that if one of us was going to dump, then I should take both my daughter’s and my compost. I compost to save the planet and hopefully make some nutrient-rich soil come spring for the garden—ahh! the garden). Once I reach the composter then I have to chisel away the snow and ice locking the lid down and yan...

Today I saw a cardinal the reddest thing ever the most colorful color in the horizon   it stood out in stark contrast to the brown and white all around   nothing nowhere compares to the cardinal flaming in the tree setting the morning on fire

As kids growing up we knew better than to disturb Mom when she was in the middle of one of her shows. Daytime TV was made up of soap operas and everyone had their favorite. General Hospital, All My Children, As the World Turns. I can still recall the opening jingle for The Guiding Light. As a kid, I thought all the stories seemed the same as far as melodrama. Someone was having an affair, someone was getting divorced, some young person was finding out their father/mother wasn’t who they thought. A character was usually being rushed to the hospital. My favorite was Dark Shadows and later All My Children, which came on after I got home from school. The point being: there was no Internet, no streaming, no binge-watching, you had to catch them at a certain time or you missed an important plot point. You might never learn WHY Janie needed an operation or WHY Margo was acting so cool to Don lately. Someone could need an appendectomy in one episode and by the next have bounced back. Somet...

 Soldier Sun   Snow-filled white out a lone orb soldier sun pulsing overhead braving to break through thick clouds inner strength to carry on

We always used to say to our daughter whenever things went to catastrophe or disaster such as a flat tire, or running out of money, or getting lost in a road trip—we’re going on an adventure—meaning: we have no clue what’s going to happen next. I guess nothing too bad because I’m still here. But, the point being, putting things into a positive light in the middle of absolute internal/exterior chaos. It was a way of buying time before freaking out in order to figure out our next step. Sometimes there is no next step, but to let the natural order of chaos work itself out. Either way, whatever happens next, the entire ride is an adventure. I had an adventure yesterday. Sunday after being all cozy in the Tiny House I decided to go get groceries and stop at the library—and, why not?!, put the skies in the back of the Jeep to cross-country ski at the trails behind Aldis. I started the car and cleared the snow off the windshield etc then went to toss the little shovel thing into t...

I’ve written here about my “normal” morning routine. It used to involve reading or listening to the news—now I’m doing a kind of Benedictine hours thing sent to me by the monks at Assumption Abbey in Richardton, ND. We’re in Ordinary Time. It doesn’t feel that way. Whenever I check in with friends from Chicago or at work here in Okemos, they all say the same thing: They/re stressed out from the news aka REAL LIFE CURRENT EVENTS. I hate to say it, but stop paying attention. If the news is killing us, killing our will to live, then we have to ignore it for our own well-being. This isn’t the same as not caring. We can continue to care and read The Sermon on the Mount. We can care by taking care of ourselves and helping others as best we can. So first thing in the morning after I wake up, turn up the heat, take the thyroid pill and my Vitamin D3 gummie, and start my kettle for tea—I go out onto the deck in only my long johns and thick sweater and shovel the overnight snow. Ther...

I was inspired to flashback to this post--originally from January 19. 2023 Pandemic-Inspired Art  . .  . Another piece I stumbled upon was at the Museum of Contemporary Art—WE ARE CLOSER THAN YOU EVER IMAGINED. Artist Shilpa Gupta works in the ever-changing transitory medium of flapboards, those old analog displays at train stations where passengers stand dead-eyed anticipating departure. The messages (as also the messages we were constantly bombarded with at the beginning of the outbreak) take on new context and meaning. The bigger picture of mass extinction, climate change, how we treat each other and the world were gently shuffled and reshuffled in an auditory and tactile rate as to lull the viewer in. We are, indeed, closer than we ever imagined to an end, a destination, to hell or a vacation, to finding solace—or limbo. Much how many of us have felt these past 3 years. The flapboard features poetry, fed to the viewer, line by line, with the odd misspelling. Thirty-five ...

I just read over the galley proof for my short story in Two Thirds North, coming out Spring 2025. I worked closely with Adnan Mahmutovic and a student editor. They were GREAT! I definitely felt the work of a close hand in revising the piece. So close that at one point I had my cursor placed to make an edit and suddenly there was another cursor there—from across the ocean and time zones in Stockholm, reading along and seeing my changes. It was weird and surreal. I sort of wish I had that little cursor following me around now as I work on my hard big revision project. This fall I intend to go to Sweden to 1) see friends, 2) hike the Kungsladen, and 3) do a few Flash Memoir Workshops at Writer Festivals. The itinerary is just now getting set up and is a bowl of mush right now. Hoping by end of February things will come together—and then pray for a great air sale. Let me know—both of my readers if you have Scandinavian connections . . .

  originally from April 18, 2018 Readers of this blog know that I am addicted to Antiques Roadshow. I watch mostly for the description. Crenulated. Wingback. Bezel. That thing on the top of cabinet clocks. When is an object more than just a thing—when you hear one of the Keno brothers go into detail about it. You come to understand it is the sum of the parts, the work invested, the craftsmanship. One of the appraisers was evaluating a book of police mugshots from Portland, Oregon circa 1900s. The term she used to describe it was vernacular, as in vernacular photos have become very popular. Here’s how Daile Kaplan defined the term: The photography of the everyday, the photography that's a record, that's a document, that has a historic truth. This is also how I might define flash memoir. This is not the letter from Abraham Lincoln or the guy who found the Rembrandt in the trash. This is more like the story behind the toy train. I got it for Christmas one year and it’s been in our...

Evangelina Everyday by Dawn Burns Cornerstone Press, Stevens Point, WI, 2022 Evangelina is the kind of book you want to curl up with. It is a small collection of flash stories—indeed reads like flash memoir, of a Midwestern wife who hails from Indiana—a state that I saw in my feed, the latest to institute posting the Ten Commandments in schools—who has a vivid thought life and not so much a vivid life. She wants to go along with the flow, but has a hard time getting into the flow. She is intelligent in the way a Renaissance thinker may have been, but, being a woman, may have also been judged a witch and drowned. At the wrong place at the wrong time, if she had tried to tell her whole story she would have been outcast. The “stories” features her looped thoughts and ponderings. All she really wants to be is accepted and walk in the fields—not the wind-whipped ones full of trash and plastic bags sticking to straw grass, but the ones just waking up from night and enveloped in dew, gli...

 NEW WORK accepted Just checked in with my submissions grid—I juggle two, one at Submittable and the other at Duotrope, it’s hard to keep up at times ): — anyway, I saw I have a new acceptance. Litmosphere has taken a shorty called I wish the Virgin Mary was my girlfriend. A weirdo that I wrote, revised, and revised some more, and then changed from poetry to a prose poem to then making it a haibun. Thanks Cheryl J. Fish! It will appear in the spring 2025 issue end of March.