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Writing Good Nonfiction Sentences… one exercise each Friday. First the necessary introduction. NOTE: several of these exercises are inspired by How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other sources. A good essay has a goal—to convince, delight, enlighten, instruct, warn, or to review and question.…
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I start this post sitting on the sofa just before 8am. It’s wet out but no longer dark. A reminder: If we were on DST all year around, it would be dark here until almost 9am. Apparently golf courses would make a bundle from after-work greens fees and candy companies are certain that a longer…
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REFLECTION: My nonsense rewriting of Lewis Carroll was tricky only because auto-correct kept fixing my words to make them sensible. I left all the ordinary words—articles and prepositions—while doing my best to watch Carroll’s verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The sensible version was much harder. I went to RhymeZone.com to hunt for my last word. The…
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Writing Good Nonfiction Sentences… one assignment each Friday. NOTE: several of these exercises are inspired by How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish, Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other sources. A good essay has a goal—to convince, delight, enlighten, instruct, warn, or to review and question.…
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Many years ago a famous author commented about the sloppy appearance of women in Washington State, where I went to public schools, Kindergarten through three undergrad degrees. She also talked about Puget Sound, using terminology appropriate to the East coast. Both comments irritated me, but non-locals talking about my corner of the natural world is…
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Attention is the beginning of devotion. —Mary Oliver I had to think hard about what happened in 2021. It was not a terrible year, not even a bad one. “Inconvenient”, as a friend suggested in 2020, a year that felt much worse. So goodbye to two years of pandemic and hello to a third. I…
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I have a photographic negative showing my grandmother, Fay Fletcher Jackson (before she married Gordon Keays Smith), standing on a Mount Hood glacier that mostly isn’t there anymore. This would be in the early years of the 20th century. She carries a small backpack because she is a very small person and wears heavy boots,…
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I was writing a card to Bette and realized that most things do not matter… the passage of time, the work I still miss doing, the “accomplishments” I would like to detail—none of that really matters. What matters is beauty and people. People and beauty. So here is beauty that I have seen in the…
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Yesterday, which was meant to be our day of rest before the drive to Portland, the Christmas tree leaked.
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I was reading an article from The Guardian on how to deal with Christmas get-together challenges. The author led with “the turkey doesn’t fit in the oven.” [I love that turkey is the English Christmas dinner centerpiece, even though what they serve is a “New World” food, not actually indigenous to Europe. So are tomatoes,…
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 