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“When even the unpopular girls are rich, if not always pretty, how will they attempt rebellion and nonconformity?” I haven’t read this new satirical novel about an elite private school in Australia. I probably never will. When I got to the line above in The New York Times review, I thought, “Why would I care?”…
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We gathered. I gathered some of it, not counting what my mother, aunt, grandmother, and other relatives failed to deal with. There were unsorted boxes in the attic that NO ONE wanted to deal with. We tried to give away a lot of things that were immediately useful—to someone else—but much of that stuff has…
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I could pretend to love The Left Hand of Darkness, but I never did. I could acknowledge that I do love many other novels such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Vonda McIntyre’s Dream Snake, and Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day. But my favorite science fiction novel is Rite of Passage by Alexei…
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Today I applied for a Hedgebrook residency. I have applied ten times before for this residency, which is limited to women. My first experience at a women’s writing residency was The Flight of the Mind in the 1990s. The first time I attended, I completely failed to anticipate the impact of spending a week with…
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I saw a meme on Facebook the other day. The wording was something like: “I decided I needed to lose 10 pounds last year, and after six months I am doing great—12 pounds to go!” That is the irony when our best intentions go backwards. I have some personal experience with that. I have been…
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A student wrote to me the other day to thank me for assigning Mountains Beyond Mountains when she was junior in my class. The young woman is in her third year of medical school and credits Tracy Kidder’s true story of Dr. Paul Farmer for inspiring her ambition. It was not the only nonfiction I…
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I have spent two days trying to get online with WordPress. Yesterday the site told me that I did not exist—not my password or email. Yet here I am. I have no idea what happened. Am I back? Fingers crossed. Yesterday I finished seaming three woven panels together. The yarn up above is on its…
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There was fog and some low clouds in the coast when we went out just after 6 this morning. We walked north, as we usually do, picking up trash and hoping for beach glass. I found three pieces in three colors, but my husband had no such luck and thought he would be skunked again.…
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Dr. Salk developed the polio vaccine. My title is a line from Four Weddings and a Funeral, otherwise notable for the use of an elegy by W. H. Auden, listed as “Funeral Blues” but also known as “Stop All the Clocks.” It is a poem of friendship and devotion and love. But I mean to…
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“Never turn your back on the ocean,” we were warned as children. Most people think of the “front” of their home as the side facing the street. What we call the front faces the Pacific Ocean. It is a beautiful view. The hummingbird above—can you see her?—she has her back to me. I was fifty…
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 