Strangers

When we came out of the bar in Iowa City, there were still twenty people on the other side of the street. They were holding signs and chanting in front of the Old Capitol. We had had nice cocktails at an upstairs bar. We had participated in a round of applause for the bartender called […]

Magritte

Magritte made me think about vocabulary. Magritte works in trunks (the human kind), tubes, clouds, wood, ball bearings, music, chess pieces, rocks. Blues and browns and blacks and greys. I work in animals, stained glass, shoulders and brown hair, houses, and glasses (the kind you drink out of). I work in fairy tales and Bible […]

Fireflies

Told there would be a dance, I tried not to get too excited. The crowd is mostly white, and writers are pathologically tangled in their heads. Yet at the first sign of music, several white haired ladies are dancing all around like they’re at Woodstock. Then more and more folks. The DJ loves Stevie Wonder. […]

Days 2/3 (Not two-thirds)

The important thing is that my teacher is nice. You didn’t care about niceness, and then you do. Then it’s really all that matters. Coffee and work, lunch and reading, class. Day two I snagged some people to have dinner with– long, easy, witty, long-lost relations banter we had over wine and martinis and food […]