No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
“Ah, nothing’s really wrong, you know. I was just watching the fireworks with my friends and, you know, thinking about how that’s another year down and… I don’t know, every year I come back here and do all the same things, see all the same people; it’s like this place is standing still. But not really, because whenever I come back the town’s a little more run-down, my friends are a bit older, the stuff we do is a bit less enjoyable. Everything’s just fading or something, I don’t know.”
It’s still sleeping-off the hoarfrost, heat drying wet night air, brute & fowl tucked into dwarf cottonwood, chollla...
That had been a year ago and I asked to go back to general assignment reporting. Eventually they let me and there I was in my 40s doing what I’d first done in my 20s, filling a shrinking news hole from a shrunken newsroom for a paper with a dwindling readership competing against bloggers.
To come, and Grow green The vineyards. To bless, and Swell the grapes To the core.
I. I am the scorned mistress, says the scorned mistress nakedly. She gives up the brilliant golden burnish of girlhood in the time it takes for the motel bathwater to run dry.
She starts her stories when her heroines are at a turning point, whether leaving a relationship or beginning a new one, fleeing a city or returning home, and shows that changing their situation gets them to where they need to go. Often her characters look to their heritage to lead the way, and a strong part of their heritage is language.