"What did my fingers do before they held him?

What did my heart do, with its love?

I have never seen a thing so clear.

His lids are like the lilac-flower

And soft as a moth, his breath.

I shall not let go.

There is no guile or warp in him.  May he keep so."

Excerpt from Sylvia Plath's "Three Women", a fairly extraordinary poem, given to me by ( Read more... )

 

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For you illustrators & artists:

"I curse and bless Engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so untractable, though capable of such beauty and perfection."

William Blake

For those of you in New York, the Morgan has a terrific William Blake exhibit.
For those of you not in New York, how about the terrific online exhibit?

"All I want is the other half of my brain back, the half that's sealed up in this plastic tub. A blank spot in my cognition, like a severed limb, an absent spouse."

From "Starlings" by my friend Michael J. DeLuca(
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"There's a thinking of the heart, too.  At the same time as you can be an intellectual; you can be very sophisticated.  I think the great artists, especially in literature, have always thought with the heart."

--Douglas Sirk, filmmaker, in an interview with Peter Lehman 1980, courtesy of senses of cinema

Easy to say, harder to do. 
Recently watched ( Read more... )

I've mentioned it elsewhere and many of you already know, but I sold my story "No Place Like Home, or Building the Yellow Brick Road" to Shimmer a few months ago.  I'm thrilled about the sale.  Not only do I love Shimmer, but it's the perfect home for this particular story. 
The story originated out of a Codex sound prompt and contest, and was the ( Read more... )

James Maxey, author of the terrific Dragon Age fantasy series Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed, is giving away signed copies of Dragonseed to the first 50 folks who contribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer foundation.  Clicking here will take you to his personal fundraising page, and you can find more info at his blog.

Great cause, ( Read more... )

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"In the face of such shape and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of a cricket in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that ( Read more... )

I woke up yesterday to a pleasant surprise--an email in my inbox informing me I'd won two free tickets to the Ursula K. Le Guin and Alan Lightman reading at the 92nd St Y!   Luckily
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