What the Heck is This Words | Pictures Thing?
It’s a blog. Beyond that, no promises as to what exactly it will be.
I’m a creative writer and picture taker since the age of having hair and braces. Now, I focus mostly on nature and our fraught place in it. Rather than morning pages or journalling, which are productive habits for many writers, I like to walk with my camera, see what catches my eye, and snap the image. And pretty soon I’m lost in the cadence of walking and looking, and then a line or a fragment comes from the ether. I’ve learned to follow. The line might be part of a novel I’m working on. It might be short and unto itself. Whichever it is, this routine is the one dependable thing that awakens my muse and sets me to my writing for the day, and I hope it brings a moment of reflection or inspiration to yours.
I call some of what I’ll do here, these short pieces, One Thing, but they are really two; a picture paired with short prose. The subject could be anything. Like poems or stray thoughts but inspired by the photography. Rather than talk about process, I’d rather just do it. And I’ll share other creative work, both brief and long. A story, a poem, an essay. Whatever these posts are, their intent is to both sharpen my blade and hopefully carve out some quiet space for you in the middle of our chaotic days.
Rising Through the Fallen
The late autumn air
has cooled in quadrants
of forties and thirties.
The prairie trail is
hollowed, a seawall of
brown stalks taller than
the average man.
At the Gulf
On the edge of the white beach I am alone near the sea grass tall and waving and dying. Again and again and again the shore laps in the hot wind. The sand here is powder. At times windswept leaving ripples across the wide plain into the gulf that is firming the firmed shore where walkers walk and runners run and bikes wheel with asphalt assurance.
Between Meetings
When a man, suppose a man of considerable wealth, has eyes
that meet you and leave you like making eye contact with a small
bird, says that his personal life just went in the crapper,
do you relate by saying, shyly, I can relate, or do you nod your
head like the cat watching the bird jump from each dry limb to the next
thinking how lucky he is to have feathers?
Long Island Johnny at the Tiki Bar, 2020
Cold December Florida dusk. Hardly anyone there.
Hardly anyone is me and you and a few others
together alone in the pandemic air.
