Blogs

…there is no real way of giving the full description of a writer’s life..

It often wobbles somewhere between obscurity and, in a subsequent second, for an evening (or a phone call), celebrity. The daily pulse, however, is the whittling of character, and the connection of point to plot. Good days involve finding the rail through the subject of the moment, and riding it evenly, creatively, and effectively, hammering together all the seams of narrative and leaving no scars to derail an audience on a tight curve.

…the town of Great Barrington is about a two and a half hour drive north of Manhattan, in the lower western corner of Massachusetts, settled in a part of the smooth, tall rolling collection of mountains, hills, forests and pastures of the Berkshires.

..the one thing there never seems to be enough of –time.

The last two weeks have been very full of presentations; ones at schools, and then, this past week, two days of ‘Showcase’ day presentations, where all 17 schools, that were involved in the WNO DCPS program, came together, at the opera company's studios in Takoma Park, to show one another the results of their work.

..when I can, there are flowers on the desk where I write. I’ll look up from time to time, or be across the room and notice color, or scent..

Storylines come like that –a word, or a scent of a story, coming to the front of my thinking. Sometimes a story can lead from simple, various, completely unrelated pieces of thought.

I bring that awareness with me to the schools I go to; I engage students, always remembering that one unrelated thing could, somehow, link to another, and, eventually, bind itself to the thread of a tale.

..snippet of a casual conversation, conducted at the reception desk in my building:
“With all that road work going on outside, everything’s being dislodged. Paul found a mouse in his kitchen.”
“You know, that smell goes away after awhile.”
“What smell?”
“That mouse smell. When they die in the wall, or behind the refrigerator. The smell goes away after awhile.”
“Well that’s good to know. ‘Cause, you know, I wouldn’t want to remove it before experiencing that..”