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Hiatus, Respite, Gap
In the big red book The Synonym Finder there’s an inch and a half list of words for taking a break. A poet creates a break in the middle of a line and calls it a caesura. Physiologists call the teeny space between neurons a synapse. Opera goers call it intermission. I call it frustrating. The rewrite…
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Beethoven, Yo Yo Ma & Me
Years ago I first encountered Proprioceptive Writing, a process with a daunting label that attracted me because it seems to have originated in Maine and I lived there, still visit often and was curious to know what other writers in my then-home state were up to. For reasons that I have forgotten, I tried it…
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Music to Write By
Last week I mentioned that because of my tinnitus I keep instrumental music playing while I do my morning pages and often while I’m working on a writing project. I formed this habit partly as a defense against noise and partly because I had experimented with a technique called Proprioceptive Writing, a method meant to deepen the act…
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Fowler Is in the House
If you don’t know Fowler, let me introduce you: Henry Watson Fowler published Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926, a reference book that I was advised to purchase in grad school. In one of my purge-and-move adventures, I lost my copy and recently decided it was long overdue to return to my personal library. The third edition has been…
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The Writing Body Eclectic
Henry James dictated. Hemingway wrote standing up. Tom Wolfe writes his prodigious novels longhand on yellow legal pads. Bodies in motion, eclectic because various. Let’s think about the need to respect the needs of the body that writes. We think, our minds make up stories, poems, ideas worth sharing, but unless we have the physical…
Karen Douglass, Author 