A long time ago, in a lifetime far away, I began each year with a dip in Puget Sound. My friends and I would meet at Golden Gardens or Alki, suit up in keikogi, and warm up as if for class. Then, sometimes with a banzai, and sometimes in meditative silence, we would wade chest high into the frigid water. Sometimes we would submerge completely, other times conscientiously keep head and hands dry. Then each of us, when we felt we had been in the water long enough to prove a point, would wade back to the beach where hot coffee and sake awaited. Read More
ByGD
Stevens Passages: It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets Hurt
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Icelandic Romance 101
Last summer, I took another small step against prejudice and genre-ism by beginning to explore the romance genre. Results have been mixed. But now I have found my favorite romance so far, and in a most unexpected place – the Icelandic Online language course. Read More
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No Raffi in This Family
What is the female form of emasculating? I don’t think English has one. Why do we have a word for making a man less of a man, but no word for making a woman less of a woman? Is femininity so bullet proof? I think not. In practical terms, “motherhood” will probably serve, despite being the most feminine status possible. Body changes, sleep deprivation, and the touched-out feeling that comes from days spent with toddlers all join forces to strip women of the very thing that made (most of us- adoptive moms represent!) mothers in the first place – our sexuality. Read More
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In Which I Love Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Roméo et Juliette Immoderately
You kiss by the book(let)
Since the invention of the kiss, there have been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure…this one left them all behind.
This line from The Princess Bride kept running through my head during Roméo et Juliette at Pacific Northwest Ballet. Since I first saw ballet, there have been four instances that left the others behind. Read More
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In Which a Review of American Gods Turns into a Writing Riff
Fiction changes lives. I haven’t written fiction since middle school. (Except that one NaNo novel in 2008, but that was therapy.) Even so, I am subject to that universal writerly neurosis – I secretly think that deep inside me lies hidden the great American novel. At least I think it’s universal. Maybe other technical writers are perfectly happy with what they do. Maybe novelists secretly dream of writing that perfectly researched narrative nonfiction.
Anyway. When I got back from Airwaves, an idea for a story popped into my head; a few characters, some themes, a couple of scenes. This is nothing new in itself. I’ve walked around narrating stories in my head that I had no intention of ever writing down since – well, since I stopped writing them down in middle school. But these characters wouldn’t go away. Whatever else I was doing, a part of my brain was thinking about these broken characters and the shit they were going through. Since another good chunk of my brain has been following my kids around in this manner for the past five years, it left precious little attention for the tasks at hand, which has, unfortunately, been noted at the day job. Read More