I’m on the studio computer a couple of days before Thanksgiving while my wife is entertaining a friend upstairs in the living room, and in an effort to be courteous but wanting still to make progress on the music listening/writing project, I decide to listen to music in the basement and record my experience inContinue reading “We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Program to Talk About Usernames and Passwords and Thanksgiving”
Tag Archives: creativity
On the Twenty-sixth Day of 2025…
…Outside of walking the dogs, I didn’t leave the house. I didn’t drive anywhere. I did very little. Meditated. Completed a few domestic chores. Communicated with my bandmates about rehearsals and rock and roll outfits. I set up a YouTube channel and vented my frustration into the ether. I took a nap. I made tacos.Continue reading “On the Twenty-sixth Day of 2025…”
#537: On Solitude
I like it. I really do. I value the time I spendalone to write, or read,the light hiking, a bike ride,and the solitary campingweekend. I think I need these moments, thesesustained chunks of timefor creativity, reflection, for communing with the self,a short, healthful respitefrom the noise, the societyof family, friends, or work. But recentlyin theContinue reading “#537: On Solitude”
On the Sixth Day of 2024: The Creative Impulse, or What the Hell Am I Doing?
I must say that the sixth day of 2024 has been a rough one. I slept in a little bit longer than I usually do, then, diverging from my usual practice of hitting the cushion before doing anything electronically, other than calling up my meditation timer, I read a text message. Needless to say, myContinue reading “On the Sixth Day of 2024: The Creative Impulse, or What the Hell Am I Doing?”
Mindfulness in 2023: A Reflection
It has been five years since I have written one of these end-of-the-year reflections. I’m coming into this one after rereading what I wrote in 2018. In the intervening half a decade, I must have been just too overwhelmed by COVID and the ending of a career in education to be bothered to do aContinue reading “Mindfulness in 2023: A Reflection”
A Journal of the Plague Year: #27
Be Drunkby Charles BaudelaireYou have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. ButContinue reading “A Journal of the Plague Year: #27”
Stop the Block by Writing About the Block: A Resolution
As the song says, it’s been a long time since I rock and rolled. Actually, I’ve been doing a lot of literal rocking and rolling on the drums. I’m speaking figuratively about the kind of rock and roll that typically manifests itself in poetry, fiction, and right here on the blog site. Inexplicably (or not),Continue reading “Stop the Block by Writing About the Block: A Resolution”
#315: On the Penultimate Day of April, the English Teacher in his Penultimate Year Writes a Long Rambling Poem Inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Burst of Productivity in the Months Before She Died
I’m not going anywhere, but (having lost now both mom and dad) I notice thoughts about mortality enter the noggin with more frequency these days. I’m reading, or rather, listening to Life Reimagined, where Barbara Bradley Hagerty argues essentially that there is really no such thing as a mid-life crisis for most mid-lifers. Much of thatContinue reading “#315: On the Penultimate Day of April, the English Teacher in his Penultimate Year Writes a Long Rambling Poem Inspired by Sylvia Plath’s Burst of Productivity in the Months Before She Died”
#278: When I Was Away, Before I Was Born, I Have Never Been
I attended a writing workshop last weekend taught by the Oregon Poet Laureate Emeritus Paulann Petersen where I was asked to participate in a generative process very much unlike the process I am used to in my own creative work. It was a very particular kind of brainstorm activity she called “priming.” Now, as aContinue reading “#278: When I Was Away, Before I Was Born, I Have Never Been”
A Single Dispatch from Writer’s Camp on the 40th Anniversary of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
First of all, I was sick with a cold when at 10:30 pm I boarded the plane for a red-eye from Portland to Atlanta, a nearly five hour flight through most of which I would be sneezing and blowing and stuffing kleenex into my own private trash bag that I kept discreetly stuffed into theContinue reading “A Single Dispatch from Writer’s Camp on the 40th Anniversary of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College”
michael jarmer 