Although the title of this blog* bows to the influence of the urban, my efforts skew toward accounts of the wild. This is by design, since the preoccupations of everyday life have a way of steering our attention toward human (aka urban, in my scheme of things) concerns: social interactions, commerce, politics, and all the…
Twenty years ago, in March 2003, we were getting ready to move. Hubby Doug and I had spent the previous fifteen months living in “the cabin”: the little studio apartment adjoining the barn we’d built two years prior. We were in the process of settling down on our rural property in Colorado’s north-central Fremont County,…
That annual autumnal vow to make good on the dark months by focusing on writing has worn itself out. Restlessness starts winning over office-bound convictions this time of year. The stuff that most needs doing is inside at my desk, but my attention refuses to stay in the room. Some part of me wants to…
I suppose it’s the usual, this dropping the thread and vanishing from blog life for weeks…okay, months…at a time. Usual for me, anyway. It isn’t that I don’t think about posts, or topics for them. I do. Regularly, in fact. But I lack whatever instinct it is that compels the killing pounce, that impulse to…
The view outside has become tiresome.
I don’t think I’m supposed to say that. I’m not a fundamentalist, but I’ve steeped myself in a tradition of natural history that holds the world as sublime: a wellspring of solace and inspiration and revitalization, source of and target for gratitude.
Such qualities are sorely needed these days, and so I started writing a post on the theme weeks ago. The rough start I made framed a dissonance between the constructed world of news and current events (the “urban” of this site’s title) and the unbuilt environment of ridgelines and woods and grasslands (the “wild” outside my door).
I didn’t know there was a name for my quirky lifestyle. Practical logistics dictated by our choice to move to a distinctly rural and reasonably remote area in the spring of 2001 amplified the tendency to social distance, but I’ve been working from home, staying put except for essential errands, and communicating mostly via email…
At a writing workshop I attended back in 1998, our instructor, Marita Golden, urged vigilance against opening a door in an essay if we didn’t intend to lead readers through it at some point. In other words, don’t distract your audience, or cloud their expectations, by using details not pertinent to the narrative focus. This…
The classic, and in some ways definitive, advice on writing is this line by Mary Heaton Vorse, as chronicled by Sinclair Lewis: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” In this era of standing and treadmill desks we might need to amend…
Well, vacations—both the planned of July and the unplanned of August—are over: time to get back to writing work. What better way to get back into the routine than to reflect on the break? About not writing in August, there’s nothing to say other than it happened. As for the July blog vacation, I recognize…
This morning began with work on a blog post I’ve had in mind since sometime in May. I took a batch of pictures for it on the first of June, and finally started writing this morning, running late but determined and optimistic. By mid-morning, I had a rough draft and broke off for a quick…