The Right Way to Write

  I have friends who own a dozen pretty notebooks they’ve never written in because a pretty notebook should be used for something special, but they write like a house on fire in a college-ruled spiral notebook. I know people who can only work on computer. There are people out there who can only write at a typewriter. I know persons of amazing and enviable focus who can write anywhere, on anything, no matter what is happening around them. Unsurprisingly, these persons write a lot more than I do. But I can write in pretty notebooks and leather-bound journals that shout “adventure!” I write in composition books and spiral notebooks and legal pads, on index cards and mirrors and windows… It’s a wonderful eclecticism, but there’s a slight problem. Just a tiny catch–

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Year of No Fear: Poetry

Continuing my Year of No Fear series.  Today I’ll talk about poetry. I’ve been writing poetry since I was 11. That’s when I discovered free verse.  Free verse is freeing, and it’s still my favorite type of poetry to write.  My first poem, which was published in our middle school paper, was a free-verse poem about unicorns (I had an obsession with unicorns for most of my childhood.)  I didn’t write many poems, and sort of dropped it until high school when I had my first real crush, my first real boyfriend, and my first real heartbreak.  My poetry muse seems to thrive when I’m unhappy.  Not the most healthy thing, but writing poetry is very cathartic.  And fun. 

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Heavy Snow

So, we had a rather massive snowstorm over the weekend. (This goes back to winter and spring being very confused seasons, which we talked about a few months ago.) Now, it’s not necessarily unheard of to have a snowstorm in the middle of May. I’ve seen it snow into June before. (Invariably this happens when I am unprepared, such as when I’m wearing shorts and sandals and am nowhere close to home.) The June snowstorms tend to be ugly things, accompanied mostly by wind and not so much by actual precipitation. May snowstorms, on the other hand, are evil for other reasons.

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Stories from the Hospital

So I spent two days this week with a loved one in hospital in Montreal, Quebec. That was scary for a while, but the scary part is over now (knock wood) and I’m slowly coming down from all that stress. What I’m starting to remember now are the little things that happened while I was focused on my own loved one’s story. The way the first-responder firefighters switched into French to debrief the paramedics. The way the gurney’s legs retracted as the bed platform slid into the ambulance. The first intake guy at the hospital, who also talked with the paramedics in fluent French (while I, despite being non-fluent, tried to eavesdrop and read the medical notes he was making on the computer — in French)…and then came over to us and said, in a clearly non-francophone accent, “How you doin’, mate?” So completely unexpected that it almost made me laugh. The tiny room where we saw the nurse, which had a second door opening onto a big lab (?) room…where people were joking and gossiping and carrying on just as if I wasn’t sitting there next to a hospital patient and trying not to freak out. The fact that my loved one was the youngest in the waiting room by about 50 years. And then, in the ward…

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