Friday, January 28, 2005

Best-Laid Plans

I was in a writing funk. You know this, right?

And so I was hoping my blog hiatus would translate directly into writing. I blog almost every day, after all. It seemed logical that I could just transfer the blogging time (brief as it is) into writing time, and end up with...something. Of course it didn't work out that way, and the time I normally would have spent blogging and blog-hopping was spent reading short stories instead. This was by no means a waste of time, of course. It just wasn't what I had in mind.

I read from anthologies, mostly: O. Henry Prize, Best American, Babaylan. And some Chekhov, Ellen Gilchrist, Gina Berriault. It's always Berriault who makes me catch my breath. How beautifully she wrote—even the titles can break your heart: "Women in their Beds," "Nights in the Gardens of Spain," "Like a Motherless Child," "The Light at Birth." She taught at SFSU for awhile, I believe. Maybe we bumped shoulders waiting in line for a slice of pizza deep in the bowels of the student union. Maybe something rubbed off, and it'll come to pass years from now.

Anyways, for a variety of reasons (and in spite of my "ethnicity? choose one" hyper-sensitivity), I am now de-funked.

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