Romulus in Roses

Mastering the Workload

For over a week I passed the cherry blossoms on my way to the office with a thought of stopping to walk among them, lie under them, sit on a nearby bench, maybe take photographs. I wanted to be part of them and part of spring before it passed. But I had no time–not to…

Wonder-Struck Winter

Two weekends ago it snowed here in Virginia, and the winter landscape made me nostalgic for Kyrgyzstan. Though I grew up near Chicago with plenty of snow, when the white stuff falls it takes me to Central Asia instead. I think it must be because my experience of winter there was more visceral and the…

A Day’s Autonomy

Mondays get a bad rap, but when I start a new work week, I often find myself entertaining an attitude of openness that speeds my morning commute.  After a weekend knocking around the apartment and walking around town, it feels good to be in the car again, taking in the views afforded by the hills…

Musings on Collaboration

This month, selections from a collaborative manuscript of hybrid correspondence between me and my creative partner Rebecca Hart Olander appeared in the August spotlight of Duende and in They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing from Black Lawrence Press.  It’s an exciting co-incidence. It’s been a summer for collaboration and other things “co-“. …

Evading Planning

I wonder who first described lawns as manicured.  It’s an expression hard to resist–it’s so on target yet out of the box in its connecting herbage to finger nails.  My guess is we like how the surprising association adds a touch of irreverence to the description of something so controlled, precious, and planned.  The expression…

College Women in Sweatshirts

1. wild NOoN Now we live lOud Now we uNveil uNwOven wild life we wolf we fOol we wield unwed lOve vow 2. Noon ClOud we unwiNd wouNd we unfiNd fouNd New Nil NOw 3. wiNd wove CoOl veil iN vOile of dew wiNd wouNd COld eNd iN ice wiNd would diN CoO iN COwled…

To My Commute

This is my love letter to my commute, to the stoplight at Graham that makes me wait and notice, that teaches me the beauty of the particular.

Puzzles and Classic Rock and a Picture of Pine Needles, Rocks, and Fried Rice

Although I’ve been a grad student and/or teacher for the last five years, this is the first winter in all that time that I’ve had a proper winter break.  I realize most people don’t get these breaks.  It’s a great aspect of being a teacher, though I suspect most teachers I’m in the middle of…

Erasure Season

One of my favorite blog posts has been Balance, in which I made erasure poems from my students’ final projects at the end of last spring semester.  I found myself thinking about it a lot last week, at the end of a rigorous fall semester and in the thick of grading final papers.  I was itching…

This Is Also Going On In The World

Leaf Picking Along 10th Street

This last day of September was a windy one, and more of fall’s fledgling foliage made its meandering way to the sidewalks, streets, and grassy margins of Arlington.  I was walking to a cafe to do some grading and found myself picking up leaves from the ground.  I’d been thinking about a project from my…

Monuments & Meaning

Recent events remind me of a text/image research project I did a million years ago: The Local Confederate Monument on the Battle Field of the Public Sphere.  This was for the American Studies website at the University of Virginia, where I was a grad student.  If it looks like it was created when the internet…

Begonia

Rocket finned, red moon petaled and many mouthed, bursts bursting bursts, begonia, your hearts and spades and chicken feet flying saucer me.  Your artichoke blood bake sugar sprinkled tender leather paper lantern me, pink lip and baby finger tip me, begonia.

Balance

Thank goodness for deadlines, or this post wouldn’t have happened.  At the same time, thank goodness for time and space.  Freedom and limitations both help me be creative.  As this busy time of the academic year reaches its peak, I look forward to the counterpoint of summer.  After a weekend of grading final projects, I…

Patterns

Patterns seem inherently meaningful. A pattern is like a language with its particular grammar, variations, and exceptions, a stylized combination of symbols. Fallen pine needles on a forest floor, the rhythm of a dripping faucet, the white lines and red crest of a pileated woodpecker, the striped leaves of a Dracaena are not so different…

Questions on Love

Today being February 13, my teaching partner and I decided to warm up our classes of graduate international students by asking them to write questions about love.  They left their names off their papers, passed their questions to us, and we read them out loud to the class.  Then they got in pairs to talk…

Detained

My husband was once detained at an airport—not taken into custody, but kept back from boarding.  We were leaving Kyrgyzstan after a three week visit with family, returning home to the U.S.  The staff at Manas Airport said something was wrong with Stas’s passport or visa—I don’t remember now—and wouldn’t let him board the plane. …

Reading Girl Out In The World

All month I’ve been hearing from family and friends of the arrival of Reading Girl, from California to the Carolinas.  And just in time for the holidays.  I’m so grateful to everyone who ordered a copy—or in some cases many copies—during the pre-sales period.  You made this book possible.  I’m also grateful to Finishing Line…

Color Doodle

I am old enough to know my numbers because Mom points to the black and white alarm clock on the bedside table and tells me I can wake her when it says 3-1-5.  She is trying to catch a nap while I play with her tin of necklaces—strings of beads and shells that clatter against…

The Tyranny of Productivity

A couple of weekends ago was the State Department’s annual book sale fundraiser where, for four bucks, I picked up The Golden Ring: Cities of Old Russia because I liked the photographs of medieval architecture and thought it might be fun to draw them.  I almost didn’t buy it, fearing I might not ever get…

Jumping Fences

Hybrids.  Grotesques.  Chimeras.  Today I’m thinking about the drawings of Eduardo Galeano in The Book of Embraces.  Have you read this book?  I love it—its playfulness and seriousness, its range, its voices, and its visions.  It celebrates art, imagination, and the human spirit through beautiful vignettes and whimsical illustrations such as a man with an…

The End of Summer Owl

More decoration than decoy, the owl did not seem to take its job seriously, leaning against the fence like a summer hire in the last week of August.  The sparrows saw a slacker and hopped around under the awning, cracking seeds against the pavement, skittering about the dogs’ water bowl, beating the heat with their…

Child Sense and Clover

I was trying to think of something to draw or do for this blog.  A while ago I’d taken a picture of clover weeds with the idea that I’d make a small painting, but I thought I could do better.  Maybe I’d go to a café and sketch something or just think of something else. …

So, Donkey Ears

I got such pleasure from playing Pictionary with four ESOL students last week.  It wasn’t the pleasure of playing Taboo, which gets everyone excited, energized by competition and the pressure of a three-minute timer.  And it wasn’t the pleasure of playing Apples to Apples, which gets everyone feeling silly, trying to be clever.  It was…

Paint What You See Not What You Know

I just spent ten days at Vermont College of Fine Arts as a graduate assistant at the summer residency for creative writers.  With equal parts hope and skepticism, I’d packed my big sketchbook and a set of oil pastels, but they never left my backpack.  I did, however, do a little sketching in my journal.…

Seeing Poppies

In 2002 I left my job at the Library of Congress, moved in with Mom and Dad for a few months, and then spent the summer backpacking in Europe.  It was a life-changing trip, though I couldn’t point to anything specific.  It’s more that the impact it made was too strong for me to doubt…

Never the Whole Story

On Saturday I spent a couple hours with an ice coffee and sketchbook at Java Shack.  After three weeks of nearly incessant rain, sitting outside in a shady spot on a sunny day felt profoundly good. With a brush tip marker, I drew my view from the wrought iron table for two—a parking lot behind…

Covering Reading Girl

The hardest part of preparing Reading Girl for publication has been creating the cover.  At first I wanted to use one of Matisse’s images, and it seemed serendipitous that the title’s namesake was a painting made in 1922, putting it in the public domain.  But a little research quickly suggested that public domain wasn’t that simple. …

Russian Windows

Kyrgyzstsan’s windows, gates, and doors offered a visual fascination that never grew old.  Their faded and peeling color blocks often reminded me of a Richard Diebenkorn painting.  They conveyed the same nostalgia but without even trying. This is a Russian window on a Russian house in the once-Russian northern region of Kyrgyzstan.  I took the…

Windows

A few weeks ago, I went to the conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Los Angeles.  I attended some great panels, learned a lot at the book fair, found some exciting new reads, and spent time with friends that I needed to see more than I’d known.  But perhaps the best…