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Art and Creativity
The Sun Interview
Righteous Babe
Ani DiFranco On Music, Politics, And Staying Independent
You have to practice tuning out the noise of the culture to hear the messages transmitted from your gut and your heart. You have to become like a bird-watcher and be vigilant and develop the skills to spot and name the quick flash of awareness in yourself.
May 2016
Photography
Where The Wild Things Are
Trained as a sculptor, Alain Laboile first picked up a camera to take pictures of his whimsical sculptures of animals and insects, but after the birth of his fifth child, he began to focus the lens on his growing family at home. He and his wife, Anne, now have six children — four girls and two boys — and are raising them in a remote region of France.
February 2016
Poetry
Ode To Scotch And A Pretzel While Watching Movies With My Dog
Tonight it seems a flowering branch of the tree / of pleasure to sit on my green couch with a tumbler / of scotch and a salted pretzel while people / pretending to be other people wheel / through the toothy gears of their lives.
January 2016Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Iceland
This was no ordinary wind. It was distant and cold, smelling of glaciers and volcanoes. It felt like the first wind, the original wind. The entire landscape bristled attentively, as if listening. Does the wind ever get strong enough to lift you off the ground? Iceland might be a place where one could actually fly.
December 2015
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Cash Cow
There are two kinds of people who show up for a taping of the PBS television program Antiques Roadshow. The first kind of person arrives bearing family heirlooms for the experts to appraise: old rocking chairs and wooden spindles, painted mirrors and Civil War swords once swung by their great-great-great-grandfathers. These people come to learn more about their items.
The second group is made up of people who want money. People like me.
September 2015Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
I Am The Star Of A Rock Video
Ever since I turned sixty, my fame has grown — slightly. I became the visiting writer at a college in Albany, New York. An article about me appeared in Metroland, the hip Albany weekly. One of my poems was published in the prestigious American Poetry Review. And a young man named Miles Joris-Peyrafitte asked me to star in a rock video.
May 2015The Dog-Eared Pageexcerpted from
Shakespeare’s Sister
excerpted from
A Room Of One’s Own
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.
April 2015Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Endless Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
Having been a writer myself, I should admire her refusal to give up. Instead it makes me impatient with her. I believe M. lives in this myth of greatness in which her every habit or quirk is worthy of the autobiography being written in her head. It is the endless soliloquy of the interior paramour. Why do I believe this? Because I used to be that way myself.
April 2015
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