I'd like to pull together a few writing resources to use for writing, and I liked this site for its inventiveness, along with a few others:

Resources for Writing:

Crawford Kilian's Write A Novel site. I also like his site on writing in general

Check out this link for what looks like a daily writing prompt! E-WriteLife Today's prompt to write about the unexpected.

Tomorrow is the first day of school, with the first half of the day an administrative overview at the college level and the second half of the day an administrative overview at the division level. Lunch happens in the middle, and we may have some time at the end of the day for students or preparing for classes.

But what is unexpected about tomorrow? (Ah, the creeping writing prompt.) Jane said to approach each day with reverence, to recognize that each day will be the "last day" for me, in this last year of teaching, that I may not again teach certain classes or work with certain people. So, perhaps tomorrow will offer unexpected connections with colleagues I have so long respected and worked hard with. Seize the day! Celebrate the beginning of a new school year with anticipation! Goals! Energy! Hope!

Summer brought unexpected changes. We were in the Canadian Rockies for a month long camping trip in August when Allen woke up one morning, his back painfully out, and we came home 2 weeks early. Perhaps we camped too close to the Columbia Icefields. I also saw millions of acres of pine trees in British Columbia destroyed by the pine beetle. Too many warm winters. Now stands of red and black dying trees cover mountains in every direction. That was unexpectedly sad for the scope of this natural disaster seems much larger than any one can prevent.

Women's Fiction with Attitude
Up to my ears in setting up a good packet to send out to agents for Mothers Don't Die, doublechecking comments on line and was quite impressed with Wylie-Merrick's online presence, which led me to this blog on women and writing. Perseverance furthers! Writers write! Earlier I read about someone who writes every day between 4 and 7 am, and someone who writes for 2 hours and refuses to allow herself any reading time before completing the writing for the day. Yet I'm used to writing between, that is writing between classes, meetings, homework, all the intensity that comes with teaching full-time. And tomorrow school begins in earnest. But my characters are itching to go forward; I'm reading Norm Stamper's Breaking Rank, a memoir by a former police chief of the Seattle Police Dept. Sometimes his insights about the changes in police work break my heart because I was there in Seattle in the 1960s when prejudice against women and minorities was taken for granted. Ah, some change and not enough change. But I'll return this blog again -- for inspiration and a sense of community. Now, back to work!

This morning I spent reading about Daoist painter and poet Chen Rong and his ink scroll painting called Nine Dragons Appearing Through Clouds and Waves, painted in 1244 and some 9 feet by 135 feet. It took me awhile to find his work online since I was remembering his name as Ronin, which means something entirely different, as I found out on Wikipedia, the mother of all these wikis (see below).

I was thinking about the swirling mist of Takakkaw Falls in Yoho National Park we just visited in Canada. The way the mist swirls in circles in the second cascade reminded me of Chen Rong's painting, the dragons appearing and disappearing in clouds of mist, a symbol of Dao practice of meditation, with monks able to achieve meditation only fleetingly. Interestingly, the painting was made while he was drunk, a common practice to achieve higher levels of meditation, much like drinking strong tea. Critics today praise his spontaneous flow of lines.

On Takakkawa Falls in Yoho National Park

The Cree Indians say Takakkaw: "It is wonderful!"
We watch as waters, fed by the Wapiti ice field 350 meters above,
these waters cascade down,
the first full surge a massive torrent,
hitting the rocks so hard
a second cascade flumes out in Chen Rong circles,
swirling mist of chaos
out of which dragons come.



Note from Wikipedia:

The word ronin literally means "wave man" - one who is tossed about, as on the waves in the sea. The term originated in the Nara and Heian periods, when it originally referred to serfs who had fled or deserted their master's land. It is also a term used for samurai who had lost their masters in wars.

Read a little more on Chen Rong and to view Nine Dragons at the Boston Fine Arts Museum, you need to use the search feature there.

Office Meditation, Summer 2006 #1

This morning stretches quiet before me.
Now a scrub jay lands on our patio roof.
I listen to clouds bump together in this early morning;
The buzz of a motorbike hums through morning quiet,
Then birdsong returns

Out of what majestic sense of nature
Did we ever begin to understand storms?
Immense clouds building up,
explained as swirling high pressure/low pressure patterns,
Rumbling skies numbered and reduced to temperature.

No wind here, the leaves hang still,
Almost waiting, almost as if they were another illusion,
Cherry leaves covering ripe fruit,
Aspen leaves that tremble in the slightest sigh of wind,
Just a few of their early summer leaves already yellow,
Already falling to the ground.



by bluenorther101

So last night I previewed Graffiti Verite! for our last humanities class, a video that makes distinctions between tagging and graffiti art, interviews mixed with wall shots right out of L.A., ending with a plea that this community-based art, which is starting to move into museums and galleries, and people are buying, just to have a piece of this energy, that the artists say is all about "working the cans" and freedom of expression, right after this, not 2 minutes after I've hit the rewind button on the VCR, waiting for the tape to rewind, one of those Fox alerts comes on from Channel 10 news that says Eugene police are tracking down a group that painted graffiti at the college. Don't know more but then this came this morning from webshots, from one of my favorite photographers, Steve Axford. And today in class, we'll talk about the culture of the 21st Century. Hmmmmm.


by steveaxford
Graffiti in Eugene: http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2005/02/03/culture.html#visart2
Graffiti in Corvallis: http://www.gazettetimes.com/articles/2005/07/06/news/top_story/wed01.txt

This week marks the end of the term. In Latin American literature we're reading two short stories for our last session: Jaime Manrique's "The Documentary Artist" (influenced by Bartleby) and Jorge Volpi's "Ars Poetica." So before tomorrow, we reread Pablo Neruda's "Ars Poetica" and just perhaps write an "Ars Poetica" of our own. Here's mine.

Impressions: Ars Poetica

A long afternoon,
A singer without a song,
Leaves trembling on the trees,
A winged mermaid floats near the ceiling,
White daisies bloom and fade,
Voices murmur in the hall,
Circling boxes and hidden rooms,
Measured time turns backward while
Letters unwritten and unread
Begin to dance.


More information:
On Jorge Volpi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Volpi
Wikipedia's definition of ars poetica: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_poetica

Yesterday I went to a Black Poets Society reading, my first poetry slam. Wow! What energy and rhythm, all hip-hop, performance, even a nice poem called I hate Justin Timberlake, and the style keeps echoing. So this morning's commuting poem came out a little differently. Read this one out loud with a rapper's beat.

Commute #33

I was driving to work this morning feeling pretty safe
when I passed a logging truck doing 60 in his place,
hauling old growth redwoods chopped out of what premordial forest hung with silence . . to be bark dust? a disgrace.

Yesterday's image floated before my face,
grass heavy fields as far as the eye can see.
Both sides of the road,
fence lines punctuated by bird song until I got to this place:
White hooded plastic covered his face, a human spraying
machine methodically back and forth, making the world safe
from all kinds of creepy crawly things,
road straight and narrow out of that place, and
I ramped it, not spending one second in that space.

Back to my papers, second-hand books, borrowed books, library books
and pocket garden, safe,
no gun carrying, sand-blasted patrol in my neighborhood,
no night terrors, no police banging, banging at the door,
no soldiers marching out on election day,
no one tied up and left to the dogs,
no people in the streets,
no people in the streets,
no people IN YOUR FACE.