February 5th, 2012.

The super bowl of social media and creativity.

I woke up thinking about Wednesday this morning. As if Wednesday was a person I knew.

This last Wednesday was a chaotic morning and no amount of breathing was going to lift me out of the mushroom of frenzy.

Usually calm and steady, on Wednesday morning I was agitated and hyper sensitive to noise. I always try to see what is the longest amount of time I can go without plugging into music with my headphones. This time even music didn’t help. People rushing to some grand nowhere. I joined them to head to one of the most dilapidated parts of New York City. ... read more »

Tagged art, authors, bell hooks, books, life, process of writing, questions, relating, social media, twitter

January 22nd 2012.

Biko. Coltrane. My father. Coleridge. Marquez.

Writing when you are under the weather is like talking in your sleep. Nothing makes sense; it all makes sense.

It is a Steve Biko kind of Sunday: “I write what I like.”

New York City is under the weather too. It snowed yesterday.

I read a post by a talented photographer in Finland, Annika Ruohonen, this morning titled “January in Finland.”  So this is Finland in January I said aloud without realizing. Maybe my heavy head thought I was using “inside” voices when I was not. I tried leaving a short comment but due to computer glitches, password itches, the comment was lost ... read more »

Tagged authors, marquez, process of writing, questions, relating, words

Before social media created the forum which allowed the hijacking of the word “storyteller” as a synonym for bloggers and marketers it was indeed a prestigious art form.

What I share below is from an excerpt to a dear friend and author, over 8 months ago.

I think I am ready to discuss this as I understand it. We are all storytellers. We live our lives in and through stories. At the lowest level of consciousness this is gossip and at another form it can be “motivational speaking,” although for the intellectually evolved such speaking may not yield many new results. We tell stories when we come home to our significant other ( if we have ... read more »

Tagged art, authors, process of writing, social media, story

In many ways I am finished.

I printed out my so called “creative clutter,” the Tuesday’s stories categorized under Tuesday’s Torrent and Fluck Tuesdays, and stared at the pages without reading. 160 pages of short narrative fiction. I wrote all of that in one year. That is a lot of Tuesdays. Approximately thirty-eight stories, I believe.

Today I re-read a paragraph from a story that I randomly picked. I couldn’t believe I had written it. This was neither a judgment of it being good nor bad. I was absolutely removed from what I was reading. I literally couldn’t believe I had thought these sentences that all went together and belonged to certain characters who wanted to ... read more »

Tagged art, authors, charles baxter, process of writing, sy safransky, travel, wanderlust, words

In a recent conversation I said, “I allow whatever needs to find me, find me. Or else there is no end to the search of ‘what else is there?’ It’s been like this ever since I was a young girl.”

This took me back to a letter I wrote in February 2009 to my closest friends via email. At the time I was living at home in California on my parents’ farmhouse, half-way through my year long hiatus from New York City, and friends sincerely wanted to know “How are you?”.  Although I did not quite answer that question, I did share something relevant.

I share the email-letter below, only partly edited.

~a.q.s.

~~~~~~

Tagged authors, Elie Wiesel, life, maya angelou, non-fiction stories, questions, relating, words