Once I was a resident in a monastery, a real one, with men in brown robes and shaved heads. It often felt a little like prison, and if you’d been allowed to visit on those days, which you couldn’t, because it was not permitted, I might have begged… Read full post »

It is October. Again. Pink ribbons. Heart wrenching stories of the stricken. Images of courageous smiling bald headed women in pink T shirts. Companies that donate a percentage of product proceeds to research if you buy this or that shampoo, yogurt, deodorant, or spaghetti sauce. Ever… Read full post »

Little things can be such big things once you’ve said them. Seated around the kitchen table one winter night with wine and friends, someone posed the question: “If you knew you had one year to live from tonight, what would you do tomorrow morning when you woke up?”  Around the… Read full post »

I do adore the people here, those remaining, and those who stepped away. However, until OS becomes easier to access and navigate, I'll be posting stuff at WordPress here  and Fictionique

Come visit.  I've started a word and picture series where I make an image, then on completion, respond t… Read full post »

When I was thirteen, I waited. Waited for almost everything, it seemed. For breasts. For periods. For boys to look at me. For adults to take me seriously.

In the meantime, I read. I drew pictures. I danced and sang and played air guitar alone in/… Read full post »

The season is beginning. It’s been a long quiet winter.

In pewter light, I take my seat, an old worn zafu cupped in the shape of me, and wait. Earlier, when it was still dark, I sprinkled bird seed along the fence outside my window, what it costs for a… Read full post »

It is a rare opportunity to understand you are standing at a crossroad, at the exact moment when you are standing at a crossroad.

My mother receives a dropper of morphine by mouth twice a day, and sleeps. I hold her hand, but she has let go. We’ve been/… Read full post »

Sometime in the late nineties: Big Heron, properly and pinkly dressed by Talbots, bracketed by her two leftie bohemian braless chicks. As documented here, and in almost every image of us, I am watching her.  She appears small, yet she is the largest woman I have known. While there… Read full post »

There is something meditative about the repetition of filling in rows and rows of squares. My friends Kim and Susan do this too, and they might agree that the addition of a checkery passage makes any image better.

I did this drawing as a trade with… Read full post »

In a still photograph, the movement of leaning in and pulling apart appear the same. Drawing the letter O, there is a moment before beginning and end are joined and cease to exist.

She is immersed in the primordial consciousness of her limbic system. I witness and wait, as she… Read full post »

Many years ago, a friend from Georgia taught me two of her Southern New Year’s traditions: a supper of black eyed peas, and the Fear Bundle. Many Southerners whom I’ve told about the Fear Bundle were unfamiliar with it, and my friend, an artist, may have… Read full post »

Oh boy, did we get a storm.  22 inches.  Come take a walk with me.

First, let's shovel out!

The other door, sigh and ow, my rotator cuff.

look to the right...

and to the left...where are all… Read full post »

Sometime around early September, I discovered a new roommate. He was tidier and more polite than some, a quiet fellow who kept to himself. He didn’t call his girlfriend in California to gab for hours, then move and skip out on an eight hundred dollar telephone bill.… Read full post »

Come September, like a cloud of bats that take off into the summer sky at sunset, they seem aloft everywhere, ghosts. Forty years of life in the same big city offer more sanctuaries than I knew I’d visited. Ghosts of people alive or deceased. Ghosts of memory. Ghosts of… Read full post »

1. I am a high school drop out.

2. I am a tenured professor at an art college for my day job.  Ha. Ha.

3. In 1972, I lived for almost a year in a tipi that my boyfriend and I sewed together from a kit purchased… Read full post »

After painting/drawing, music is my second love. Writing, third. Sorry(!).  I own eight guitars, two of them I built, while apprenticed to a luthier in the nineties. One is a vintage 1933 National style O resonator guitar.  I am a blues woman.  Most of my favorite musicians are old dea… Read full post »

The Ferrari of paper fiber is Belgian flax: tough, long fibers, strong as leather, beautiful color and surface that will last for centuries. When spun and woven into fabric, flax becomes linen. Flax paper is to drawing what linen is to painting, the ultimate surface.

Wearing ugl… Read full post »

We drove from Pittsburgh to Cape Cod in the family station wagon that summer in 1970.  For too many road hours, we’d listened to my dad proselytize about Bookbinder’s Restaurant in Philadelphia, a stop on our itinerary. I was sixteen, lived in a landlocked state, had a moth… Read full post »