I grew up in a house bustling with artists. We had extra bedrooms that my mother kept filled and a grand piano that was always in use. To this day she hands out her number to people she picks up at bus stops and airplanes and the rapid transit. But mostly, she’s lived with musicians who come from abroad to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music; young people who have been given scholarships for their studies, but no money on which to live. My mother fills the refrigerator and her artists fill the house … Continue reading The Cottage: A Womb With A View→
HELP, I’m roiled in moil, chaos on every side of me. My life flashes before my eyes, although the only thing I’m drowning in is the sorting of minute particulars. It’s a cautionary tale. Some time ago (has it been weeks?) I bought a copy of a benign looking little book called the life-changing magic of tidying up. It had occurred to me, on numerous occasions that this is something I ought to be doing, tidying up, I mean, and so this looked like the answer to if not my prayers, probably somebody’s. Marie Kondo, … Continue reading Cleaning Up→
“Just meet me at my internist’s office,” my mother texted. “Oh, ok. You have an appointment?” “Yes, I’ve had some internal bleeding.” “Oh, ok. I can be there by 4:30.” I was going to visit my mom for a night on my way back to Virginia from Maine. Change of plans I guess. It was a couple of days before my birthday and I hadn’t spent a chunk of time alone with her in a while. But instead of driving to her apartment, I headed for the hospital. Typical of my mom to announce off … Continue reading Birthday At Rite Aid→
Two years ago I couldn’t have even told you that Carson McCullers was female. My familiarity with Southern Gothic was that limited. But this summer I found myself haunting Columbus, Georgia, her birthplace, seeking some sort of connection with the woman who wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Like Mick Kelly or Jake Blount, peripatetic characters from that book who wandered the streets of what is only a thinly-veiled Columbus, I walked the city, past the old cotton mills along the Chattahoochee, down by the old bus station from which Antonapoulos, “the obese and dreamy … Continue reading A World Intense and Strange→
Beyond the obvious grief of losing a parent or relative to old age, there is a particular tragedy that accompanies a person’s passing rarely whispered inside the comfortable blandness of funeral homes or over the open caskets of the recumbent dead: the tragedy of discovering lives left unfinished and dreams unfulfilled while cleaning out the lingering personal effects of the departed. In my lifetime so far, I have sorted and removed the orphaned belongings from the homes of three people that have escaped their corporal lives: a woman in Boca Raton, Fl, whom I only … Continue reading Post Mortem Clean-Up→
I live in a town where the writer who cranks it out rakes it in. I can’t get past page three in any of John Grisham’s books before I give up. Those books are page-turners though, you betcha, the whole who-dun-it thing, the thriller. Characters so thin you see right through them. People in my town, Charlottesville, Virginia, are so besotted with his celebrity they make a habit of dropping by the bookstore where he signs absolutely anything anyone wants in the frontispiece of his books. I have waited years for some reviewer to break … Continue reading At Least I’m Potatoes→
Over the past year, I watched Mike, one of my best friends, die of a brain tumor. In the midst of this misery, I came to think about things that make life worth living. Foremost is love, of course, but after that comes music. Music is a nondiscursive joy, like a view of mountains on a clear-blue day, that pulls one into the moment. To experience music is to forget everything else, to be here now. I say “experience” music rather than “listen to” music. Like most people, I enjoy listening to music; it provides … Continue reading Music Medicine→
All right then. I get it. The San Souci Motel is called the San Soo-chee, not the Sahn Soo-cee. People in Buckroe Beach, Virginia, do not go in for Frenchification. At least according to my husband’s family, who’ve been going there since the fifties. The San Souci is the last remaining water-front motel at Buckroe Beach. It was built in 1958 and has stayed true to its raising décor-wise. It is what it is. Buckroe is not really the beach beach; it fronts the Chesapeake Bay rather than the ocean. It offers only the politest … Continue reading A San Souci State of Mind by Martha Woodroof→
I’ve encountered many different roads to take on my quest to develop my style as a poet. Sometimes I’ve moved forward and sometimes I’ve stayed still, uncomfortable with change. I expect this has been the case with many poets. However, the totality of experiences has led me to a deeper understanding of what I’m doing and what I’m capable of. Looking back, I realize that an underlying factor in my progress has been the slow discovery, conscious and unconscious, of poetic techniques that work for me. These techniques were introduced to me from an early … Continue reading A Lifetime of Poetry→
One day I decided I wanted to write a short story with a sex scene in it. I decided this for two reasons. One, first and foremost, I had read a short story by my sister’s high school boyfriend and he executed a sex scene in this way: ‟They did it.” It seemed to me that he handled it quickly and skillfully. Reason number two, (and this is more subterranean): I had males in my writing group I wanted to impress. Usually when I join a writer’s group it is a female-only affair and although … Continue reading The Making of the Third Eye→
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