At 2:18am At 2:18am the world and her heart are ever so dark, thoughts circling like a hungry pack of wolves, “Fancy a dance with death?” she hears the night remark. The wind grazes her with its teeth and taunts her, while her sister in the room next door snores and slumbers with…
Author: insister_xz0h57
Shelving stories, storying shelves
Shelves hold things … Ursula K. Le Guin maintained that words and books “hold things” and bear meaning – just like a medicine bundle, together “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.” Wandering through the lowly lit stacks of secondhand books in Archives Fine Books in Charlotte Street on…
She decided to resist and insistered on structure
When women speak truly they speak subversively — they can’t help it: if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. Ursula K. Le Guin, Bryn Mawr College commencement speech, 1986, published in the essay collection Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 1989. Ursula K. Le…
In homage to Mary Shelley
Writing: In love with theory, words and language
Some of my most loved Ursula Le Guin words features the word love. “Love”, she writes in The lathe of heaven, “doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new”. Trying to decide on the cover for my new book, these words kept returning…
Writing, life: In secret whispers
Writing, life: In secret whispers She writes in secret whispers Speaking herself as heroine of her own story The diary holds the key to free her soul Her friend listens intently as she scribes Today I did this, tomorrow I will do that She writes in secret whispers She promises herself more than a fairy…
An ode to Emily Dickinson
An ode to Emily Dickinson I will be forever grateful to bell hooks for introducing me to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. For hooks, the poetry of Emily Dickinson was a way to find love in a world where no one understood what that world meant. “Poems came in another language”, hooks recalls as she…
Just three words: Writing with Laurel Richardson
I am home. Sun kissed free. Wild heart dancing. Breathing in out. Warm winds play. About my face. In my hair. Caress my body. Here I am. Staring fixed fast. Who is she? The mirror tells. The only truth. I keep looking. Seeing a/not-her. There is way. Too much body. My breath holds. In that…
The feminist song
While away on retreat with the DRAW (Departing Radically in Academic Writing” group at the end of 2020, we were tasked to create a writing manifesto, a statement which clearly set out our beliefs in who we are as writers, what we write and why. I immediately thought of Valerie Solanas’ 1967 “S.C.U.M (Society for…
Returning to Laurel
Every once in a awhile you return to writing you love by writers you adore, writing that is filled with love for words and the world, and reminds of you why you love writing too. Today I returned to Laurel Richardson https://laurelrichardson.blog/. Laurel is a feminist sociologist well-known for her book Fields of Play: Constructing…