How to Cope, Part 2,345,679

What sort of superpower would you have if you could?

I'd like to fly, I think. I'd like to soar. I love the word soar and how it conjures wings wide open, arms, too. Then again, I'd like the ability to go back in time.

Go back in time to fix things you messed up or change the outcome of your life?

Oh, not at all. I have few regrets and none that I'd fix if it made today a different one, at least in my life. I would like to go back to the moment when I learned to read. I'd like to hold onto that feeling and then maybe go back to what it felt like sitting up in the cherry tree in my front yard in New Jersey where I read The Hobbit and the Henry Huggins books, Lois Lenski, A Little Princess, Jane Eyre. I'd like to feel that feeling again -- being immersed literally in a book of fiction.


What are you reading?

God. So many things at once. Dostoevsky Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky. Don't roll your eyes. It's good. How could I call his novels my favorites and not have known that he married his stenographer after she transcribed The Gambler as a twenty-year old? Being the perfect wife to one of the great (male) writers was, sadly, something I was rather obsessed with as a young woman. I won't give you more details because like I noted above, I wouldn't change a thing. Also, the very funny Harrison Scott Key's The World's Largest Man. I follow Key on Twitter where he makes me laugh every single day, and so far I'm laughing through his memoir. Oh, and I just downloaded The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone a new book by Olivia Laing, described as "an expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir and biography on the subject of loneliness...." Weird. Lots of non-fiction, which is unusual for me. I'm still reading Lucia Berlin's short stories, though, and every time I start thinking about Drumpf and any of the goings-on in The New White Supremacist Republican Party of Spineless Humans, I pick up Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and am lulled into a nineteenth century daze. Since the novel is probably tens of thousands of pages (I've downloaded it on my Kindle and am around 13% done), I'm reading it in a sort of bookworm's drinking game to deal with TNWSRPSH (see above to translate acronym). I also love Trollope so it's a win-win for me.











I'm trying to develop a sense of place in my writing.

The windows of lovers.

A broken window looking out onto a Georgian column, a sloped grassy hill only visible if you peel back the pizza box shoved in place of the glass. The smell of piss, the sound of a broom sweeping. Four panes broken by a cross, un-curtained with a view of a pond and scraggly field, over my shoulder if I lie flat on the bed, naked and laughing. A yellowed pull shade, darkened by cigarette smoke, the stark branches of a tree, black in a gray sky, if I lie flat on the black couch, the material slippery against my skin. Bars, a rusted fire escape, visible from the door where I stand, clothed. Blinds, slanted light, the sound they make, the rustle, when a breeze hits them, then me, peace.


What's happening, Reader? How are you coping?