From whiskey river:
Have you been to the source of a river? It’s a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, [...]

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Via agent Janet Reid, whose taste in videos (even when she’s not sure what to call the thing video’d) is impeccable:

The poem, and I guess the performance, is by the poet (Taylor Mali) himself, although the video was put together by “student Robert Bruce.” As Mali’s site says:
I have no idea who he is (and [...]

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Last night, The Missus and I attended a combined reading-talk-Q&A session with Margaret Atwood. (For the curious, if you’re ever in this neck of the woods in (mostly) February, do check out this arts festival.)
The bandwagon of people who believe that those of diminutive physical stature tend to compensate with outsized personalities and ambitions is [...]

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I’ve activated a feature here at the site to let you subscribe via email to follow-up comments on a post. To do so, you’ve actually got to leave a comment yourself — including (duh) an email address; then check the little box labeled “Notify me of followup comments…,” which appears just above the reCaptcha form.
Background: [...]

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Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you'd prefer being [...]

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[Photo above, "Standing Still," is by Beth Dickman. Click to see the larger original.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Moment
In the Romanesque church round stones
that ground down so many prayers and generations
kept humble silence and shadows slept in the apse
like bats in winter furs.
We went out. The pale sun shone,
tinny music tinkled softly
from a car, two jays
studied [...]

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They say we shouldn’t anthropomorphize animals. We shouldn’t project onto their behaviors human motivations, so goes the advice; maybe we could develop a Maslow’s pyramid for them without stretching too much, but it’d be a mistake to give them them an upper level labeled “self-actualization.”
Still, you know, it’s hard — almost impossible — not to [...]

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“Ambivalence” doesn’t even come close to capturing my schizoid views about magic (or magical) realism.
The term has been around since the early part of the twentieth century, and for most of its life has been associated especially with the work of certain Latin American authors. Here’s part of the definition from A Glossary of Literary [...]

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[Image: "Good and Evil," by Daniel Merriam. See the original, more clearly, at Merriam's own site.]
From whiskey river’s commonplace book (“the pursuit of fantasy“):
Writing in the Dark
It’s not difficult.
Anyway, it’s necessary.
Wait till morning, and you’ll forget.
And who knows if morning will come.
Fumble for the light, and you’ll be
stark awake, but the vision
will be fading, slipping
out [...]

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Many writers hate the question from non-writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I suspect one reason they hate it* is that they themselves don’t really know, but wish they did — so they could return to the well again, and again, and again…
No such luck in the real world, of course. Some story ideas [...]

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