Dear Auntie Deborah: Help! My characters have gone amok and won’t follow the plot of my book! What can I do to whip them into shape? — A Frustrated Author Dear Frustrated: The short (but brutal) answer is that your characters … Continue reading
The Jaguar
Ursula K. Le Guin
the ghost of a jaguar walks through the fence
the jaguar is our freedom
Build a wall of saguaros,
butterflies, and bones
of those who perished
in the desert.
I’m sorry about not keeping up my blog posts, but everything got interrupted for me this summer when my congenital heart murmur (leaky valve) finally began to exact its toll. I spent a few days in hospital, have been home now for three weeks. Doing fine but not doing very much — and that looks to be the way it will be for a while…
Continue readingI tried not to think about 9/11 yesterday. It’s not that it isn’t important. In fact there are those moments in your life when you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when something powerful occurred. A … Continue reading
I chose Robinson Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks” because it always makes me cry. I’ve never yet got through the last lines without choking up. Jeffers is an uneven poet, and this is an uneven pair of poems, intemperate and unreasonable. Jeffers casts off humanity too easily. But he was himself a kind of maimed, hurt hawk, and his identification with the birds is true compassion. He builds pain unendurably so that we can know release. –UKL
Continue readingThis blog post is included in: No Time to Spare Thinking About What Matters by Ursula K. Le Guin Introduction by Karen Joy Fowler December 5, 2017 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt … Continue reading
