notes from a creative life …
You find yourself in a windowless room — the walls crumbling plaster, gray. (I know this because I am there too). You don’t know how long you’ve been there, but you know it’s been a long time, because there’s a hunger in the back of your eyes: for color, light — carmine, sun-yellow, cobalt. Your body is stiff, hunched, the bones nearly bent. The ceiling is […]
I go down to the river with my camera. The water is slowing to ice but the shoreline is still wet, the grass flecked with drops like diamonds. Maybe tears. I get down on my knees and part the dead rushes, brown tufts, looking for green. I am thinking of a certain kindred spirit, who has been […]
This post is part of the Secret Messages Project. Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all. I hope you’ll join me. * A few weeks ago, a wrote an almost-poem about manholes. I kid you not. I found a particularly […]
This post is part of the Secret Messages Project. Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all. I hope you’ll join me. * We drive south, past the New River Valley into Giles, where the road climbs up and up […]
This post is part of the Secret Messages Project. Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all. I hope you’ll join me. * It’s been awhile since I shared anything here that approached what some people call by the name “poetry.” […]
This post is part of the Secret Messages Project. Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all. I hope you’ll join me. * The mockingbird warbling in the bush beneath my window — surely he never stops his mouth […]
This post is part of a series. To read more, click here. * First things first: English teachers of the old-school Orthodox variety, gifted literary critics, and serious professors of poetry and the analysis thereof: for your own sanity, please avert your eyes. Okay then… * A few weeks ago, I had a funny conversation with my […]
This post is part of a series. To read more, click here. * I got out of the car and walked down the hill alone, a small wooden box clutched in my left hand. In the last of the day’s light, everything looked like a charcoal sketch: black and white and gray. My heavy fleece-lined […]
This post is part of a series. To read more, start here. * Today, Thomas and I drove back the way we once came. We steered the car onto I-81, south toward the New River Valley. Eight years ago, when we were newlyweds, this place was our introduction to Appalachia. It was a season of my life that […]
A few weeks ago, I made you a promise: I would write all winter, and I would share my words in places where they could be found. So today, the first day in this untrammeled new year, I decided to begin fulfilling that promise: I went to the back yard and found a stone. I […]
ASHLEY WILSON FELLERS 