Just another writer
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Beautiful Sentences
Flotsam consists in all natural matter that floats upon the ocean. Jetsam consists in all manmade matter that floats upon the ocean. What then is a human corpse? And were I to slip myself over the side of the ship, would I possess the courage to let myself drown as flotsam drowns—nature blissfully sinking into…
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Truth
Something has been bothering me for a while. I’ve found in discussions with my friends who are Republican there is a disturbing willingness to believe things which, quite plainly are not true. And by this, I don’t mean things that are debatable, whether legitimately, as in the case of Keynes vs Hayek in economic theorizing,…
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Beautiful sentences
Why do the spaces look smaller than the words that used to fill them? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.
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Beautiful sentences
In the woods, bewildered, in a peck of troubles, at a loss. To ascend a pulpit, to cant, to remove one’s vestments with one’s teeth, to chase foxes at clicked in a hedge, to stand stooped in a pillory, cunny-thumbed, one who has eaten shame and drank a dram after it. Lawrence Sutin, When to go…
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Beautiful sentences
Did lifeguards look like lifeguards only after they‘d saved somebody? And what if they failed? What did they look like then? Abby Frucht, Polly’s Ghost.
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Beautiful sentences
I want to do everything I haven’t yet dared to do, and to escape everything I’ve already done. I want to die in a cataclysm of my own making, not in a world war fashioned by great nations. And I want to leave a written record of my passage across this earth, so that others…
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Point of view in “The Casual Carpool” by Katherine Bell
In her contributor’s note in Best American Short Stories, Katherine Bell writes: I loved the way Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield handled point of view and I wanted to see if I could manage shifting among several characters’ consciousnesses from paragraph to paragraph, or even sentence to sentence, without ever zooming out. (360) Bell manages…
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Beautiful sentences
I wanted to believe him and he wanted to be believed, and I guess that’s the beginning of hope anyway, a tiny seed you hold real careful in the palm of your hand. Robert Vivian, The Mover of Bones.
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Residency day 9
The morning seminar was entitled “Reading Like a Writer” but was ultimately about what sorts of things to do with our annotations in the course of the tutorial period plus some general information on how things will work in the MFA. For our final workshop, we did a couple of writing exercises. I played with…