“I believe that most of us who regularly and purposely engage in artistic or creative work, insulate the central “work” part of the activity with a complicated, flimsy, but highly essential cloud of…

“I am a merry-go-round mannikin yanked by the pole at the top of my head and tossed off the wheel. My pole goes into the soft ground. I see the whirling stars beneath…

“Raven is the one chosen to do the honk, which he’s always trying to perfect; which he’s always trying out a one-more-time, brand-new version of that never quite works. Still, we stop and…

“I mention this only because it surprised me that the image did not immediately snuff itself out as such images generally do, but rather hung around as if it were an emissary from…

“Here in the northwest, where we have an enormous light-swing between summer and winter (16 hours of daylight in midsummer, to something less than eight in December), we inmates have developed a kind…

“I didn’t plan it this way, but it turns out that my backyard garden has the exact number of flower blossoms in it to support one hummingbird: no more, no less.” Anita Sullivan …

“‘Anecdote’ means ‘unpublished,’ which means informal, without shape or polish. Your own story is, well, yours; it’s a work in progress, connected to you like a Siamese twin and, in a sense, not…

“When I met and married you, we had two pianos and a clavichord all of those 14 years, and my nourishment by Piano continued unabated. If you are what you eat, I am…

“The bird itself is so ancient and regal that its name is probably placed into the modern ‘blue’ spectrum as a courtesy; what we call its color is more like an immortalized patina…

“A sequence of overlapping periods in which I did not hear this clock at all stretches through the capillaries of memory, back to my childhood, when the clock spoke regularly and with dignified…