"I didn’t expect to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable. ‘Sable is right for you, Suseleh,’ Mr. Klein said, draping a shawl-collared jacket over me. ‘Perfect for your skin and your eyes. A million times a day the boys must tell you. Such skin.’"
— For some reason, I had not read Amy Bloom’s first collection of short stories, Come to Me, until oh, 20 hours ago. That striking Chip Kidd cover stared at me from my shelf, but given the number of lady-penned short story collections I’ve been waist-deep in lately as a result of a) the winter, generally felt, b) the winter, as it pertains to acute needs for words that read like tea leaves, and c) the sheer number of those I have to plow through, I hadn’t picked it up. And then I did. And she may write the best opening lines I’ve seen.
So much, in so little. Via LIFE.

So much, in so little.

Via LIFE.

"I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty-fifty chance two will have the same birthday. Who cares whether or not it’s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through."
— Amy Hempel.

” Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven our best thoughts — poet’s thoughts, especially — will not be flowers, somehow, or some sort of beautiful live things that stand about and grow, and don’t have to be chaffed over and bought and sold. It seems as bad as selling our fellow beings, but being in this world everything must have a body.”

The letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, despite being about a hundred years old now, are not a bad thing to read. At least in a song remains the same sense.

This feels undeserved. I haven’t been practicing hard at all.

This feels undeserved. I haven’t been practicing hard at all.

"I’m still trying to find someone who recalls this movie I saw as a very young child called My Pal Wolf, about a little girl who takes in what she thinks is a lovely lost wolf, though it turns out he is just an escaped police dog and she has to return him to the police. Some days I feel all my work has come out of that one movie."
— Lorrie Moore.
jeblogue: Heartbeet.

jeblogue: Heartbeet.

Letter-writing, V2

It’s 2010 and I’m starting up my second round of sending out physical written correspondence to anyone who emails me to do so in my ceaseless pursuit of the most anachronistic and expensive way to communicate with people. If you asked for one the last time and I didn’t have time to write you a letter (and I know there was more than one of you, ack), you get first dibs, so tell me so.

Licking the stamps now.

Earlier: The last time I did this.

"The cows walk around like dogs here and wander in the streets. We are spending long days and days and nights are confused. So far no major creepy crawlers."
— True postcard from my momma. She is in India making palates whole again, and filing the best motherly dispatches one could ask for from there.
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Themed by: Hunson