Resurrecting some hazy high school memories?

 The Neat L'l Bookshop will reopen WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2.  John and I spent time with friends ~ on seaside walks, watching the ocean dolphins, pelicans, gathering shells and taking long drives along the Gulf Coast.

 

 

On Writing ~

"It took many years of writing, thousands of pages, to discover that I could not find the fit between experience and record by writing with 'summing up' words.  To say that a canoe trip was wonderful, and that the river was beautiful, and that I had many adventures accomplished nothing in the journal:  I didn't even have the pleasure of reliving the best moments while writing about them.  And yet this ingrained tendency to generalize I still have to fight daily.  A journal filled with 'nices,' wonderfuls,' 'terribles,' and 'interestings' is one drained of any live juice.  If that kind of writing merely reflects habit, there is hope for change.  If the writer insists on it, consider it a sign of a deep-seated fear of the real."

~ Hannah Hinchman, A TRAIL THROUGH LEAVES, The Journal As A Path to Place/An Inspiration to journal-keepers and commonplace-book-makers everywhere, W.W.Norton & Company, 1997.

Miss Marple

"I may fling down a sketch in a moment, if my cat happens to be doing something droll, and then the page has received the seed of its structure.  Or it may begin with a deliberate and soothing geometry:  blocks of intricate text building up like rows of knitting, a tension between  organic form and implied vertical/horizontal axes.  The book, the pages, are physical things, and the way I make something with the raw materials is handiwork.
     There is nothing like the feel of the tip of a reliable, familiar pen gliding over the paper, leaving a crisp trail, and the sense of control in the fingers shaping beautiful letters.  Especially early in the morning before a cup of coffee has rippled the stillness of the waking state, to write is to luxuriate, and fulfills some indescribable need.  Then there is the boldness of brush lettering, the cooperation between the tip of the brush, which has its own shape and tendencies, and the guiding hand  working out a plant-like pattern made of thick and thin, curved and straight, sharp and rounded marks."

~ A TRAIL THROUGH LEAVES The Journal as a Path to Place, Hannah Hinchman, W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Tomorrow:  Hannah's "fit between experience and record by writing with 'summing up words.' " 

(photo lbw Thought for my artist friend Sharon)