SPEAKING MY HEART

Invention and Necessity

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 17:24:00 GMT

Finding a copy of The New Yorker magazine in the middle of the West African bush never was easy. In Liberia in the 1970s, it nearly was impossible. In those days, living 120 miles inland from the coast and being limited to markets and shops that specialized in canned mackerel, Russian toilet paper and beer preserved with glycerin, browsing the newsstand wasn’t an option.Occasionally I cadged a copy of the culturati’s Weekly Reader from expatriates living in Monr...
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Ft Hood ~ Need for Blood #48

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:11:00 GMT

Halloween is the season of horror. Goblins, ghoulies and ghosties skulk around the edges of consciousness. Television movie channels pull from their graves the remains of plots that refuse to die ~ Psycho, Vertigo, Rebecca - while Hitchcock's Birds wheel through the air. The little ones may delight in dressing up as princesses, pirates or warlords, but blood drips and body parts pile up for the vampires, zombies and other assorted creatures of the night who seek ...
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Furnishing Our Stories

Sat, 3 Oct 2009 21:53:00 GMT

What I was reading was John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Unlike another of his classics, The Grapes of Wrath, the saga of Doc and Dora, Mack, Hazel and Eddie never was banned by any library or school board I know of, but in my parents' household, banning would have been irrelevant. Books were written, and books were meant to be read. If the reader happened to be a third-grader who'd pulled a grown-up novel off the shelves because she was attracted by the cover, so be it...
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Taught by a Heron's Heart ~ DMCA

, ::00 GMT

Writing has brought innumerable changes to my life. In addition to solving quite concrete and practical problems like finding enough time in a day to write, I've been forced to confront issues which, quite frankly, didn't concern me even a year ago.One of those issues is content theft, known more formally as copyright infringement. Across the web, musicians, photographers, writers and artists of every sort have been forced into a kind of guerilla warfare with folks...
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Solstice Laundry, Graphics Grinch

, ::00 GMT

What happens when you give a nice, serious, aspiring writer too much eggnog? If you're lucky, she starts to laugh at herself.Most of you know I've got this "thing" about graphics. I love photos and illustrations that go along with a blog theme, but I just get all twitchy when folks load up the comments section with unrelated gifs, jpegs and YouTube videos. Maybe it's snarky, maybe it's pretentious, or maybe I'm just flat weird, but that's the way I am. Now, if we...
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