On May 1 I took a one-way flight from JFK to Barcelona but when I landed the airport was closed, the workers on strike for May Day, the only occupants a group of young Spaniards in uniforms with beards and… Read More ›
journal writing
Portrait of the artist as a portrait model
No one smiles in these old portraits. They look stiff, like they’re already dead. Maybe it’s the knowledge only portrait models have that makes them look like that, deciding how you’ll look forever. They look trapped in their own time…. Read More ›
Sand tray therapy
It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or… Read More ›
In the days of auld lang syne
I didn’t even look through it before throwing the calendar away. I used to page through them for kicks, to see what I’d written and reflect on how far I’d come. My grandmother made a practice of writing a short… Read More ›
What I would do if I had the time
Saying I’m unemployed sounds dramatic but I guess it’s true. You go through periods of being unemployed when you work contracts and for me it’s not much of a thing. Since the pandemic, I’ve worked a string of jobs (maybe… Read More ›
Ich genieße es!
In the morning I sat with Eberhard’s cat under the covered patio out back as the trash collectors wound their way up the small roads to the village. He’d built a series of ladders for the cat to climb from… Read More ›
It comes in like a lion
I guess books remind us that one person’s experience could speak for thousands and we could share some intimacy with strangers, make the world a smaller place.
Something I learned today
At the back of the property the blackberry vines were advancing but the fruit was anemic and as I sampled it there was deer scat in the grass and fruit flies that made me feel uneasy. I went back once… Read More ›
Book of mirrors
Dappled yellow leaves on the ground and rainwater gathered on trash can lids pooling in the creases. Back to wearing socks and donning my old sweater, funny things in pockets from forgotten times. Robins tugging worms from the scruffy rise… Read More ›
Saved by old times
Like a Greek myth that punishes its subject to suffer the daily pattern of futility as recompense for some trespass with the gods, so it was: not the recurring monotony of the pandemic but instead just getting our kids to… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 