I wandered, literally, up and down the bruited and brutal ‘Oregon Trail’ which so many nineteenth-century Americans eager (or greedy) for a ‘better life,’ for the ‘American Dream’ set out on, in unbelievably rickety wagons, with children, wives, cattle, guns, food, elders (most in small quantities, except sometimes children) for the Pacific West and Northwest.
And two night ago I arrived at the Centrum Writer’s Residency in Port Townsend, WA, to write, reflect, self-flagellate (? always!) and look at the Pacific for three weeks.
You learn about the narrator and you cluck-cluck at her adolescent mistakes of judgment (if that’s what they are, as in they were generated by her fervent love for her complicated and beautiful mother); you grow up with her and her inner anguish; you break away with relief and happiness for her.
Africaville by Jeffrey Colvin Africaville is, to put it briefly, stunning. It took me some time to grasp the reasons for the diffuseness of the book’s events, characters, and topography. Frankly, names and places seemed to be jostling, crowding one another too closely, sending things out of focus. After reading more, though, and noting the peripatetic lives of so many characters in the community — living or dead — I began to realize that the mode is the matter. The diffuseness of the telling gestures at the displacement and movements of the African diaspora, with corners and nooks of the…
Don’t know why but I’ve been writing and editing pieces of work and my head has suddenly filled with an image poem. Something I saw. Something I loved. Something I took a photograph so I can go back there any time. Vancouver, Coal Harbor, on a crystalline January evening. And wanting to share my joy in that image I created a dress and a skirt on redbubble from my memories. Holler if you like them! http://www.redbubble.com/people/gayatris2/works/43709304-blue-yonder?p=a-line-dress&asc=u
One Planet, Only One 
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