Thirteen years ago this week I had been blogging for three months, and instant publishing was all fresh and enlivening. My HERE and my WHO were unknown but apparently of some interest to others who would become regular Fragments readers.…
It started out as an assignment, sort of, for Tommy Bailey’s book, Floyd Folks. Which, btw, if purchased in town (say, at the Floyd Community Market) will send proceeds to support the market. The version of my little part of…
The time I was to spend with the visiting students back in March started out to be a “nature writing workshop.” In the end, something else filled the time instead, but the notion of teaching about nature writing made me…
After a night on the futon to distance my contagion from the wife, I’ve admitted at the end of four days of symptom creep that I probably have a cold–nothing more than that, most likely. It has been a couple…
I would never have spent my morning pages last week doing this had not I been prompted by a classmate who was penning some memories of those times for his grand children. We both attended Minnie Holman Elementary in Woodlawn…
“Keep your eye on the pea. Follow every move, suckers. Our hands never leave our arms. Confused? That’s right. You can’t really know which shell hides the real gas pipeline route. ” There’s been another feint in the direction of…
As “modern Americans” we expect at least the standard of living we learned to live with while growing up–if not way better than that. I can’t think of any group of adolescents that would accept the notion–much less strive for–having…
No that is not the working title of this thing before me. But it is the punch line as I’m thinking through the story line of this book idea. It starts in a tiny community called Floyd where a pipeline…
Continued from Part One, of course. And so, my initial response to this request would be to try to reframe the experience into one of improved nature relationship rather than improved nature writing. What I would rather see happen than…
I will have the opportunity in March to spend some time with two dozen university students from an urban-east college. Presumably, most will have had little exposure to the rural lifestyle and landscape as they will experience it on their…
I’m pretending, as a fumbling fiction writer, that there will be a life after carbon. It is a thought and a hope I’d like to hold up as a possibility, though I hold serious doubts, because I do not think…
I pulled out my trifold scrap paper scratch pad that is always with me. The Earth had just moved under my feet in the middle of a church service, and I had to take note. What had happened is that,…
I find myself, once again, staring out the window by my desk, my eyes falling more often than not on the “New Road” that rises out of the pasture just past the barn. We (and especially SHE) follow that path…
I’m catching up with myself, from this time a few years back when I imagined keeping up all along through an entire year with a seasonal journal–part of my “Floyd County Almanac” that sits just exactly where it did when…