dogs, too, changed our lives

"Owning a dog was for most people a commonplace--completely unremarkable. For us, having a dog marked a dramatic new direction. Months earlier it would have been unthinkable, an irresponsible indulgence, derided and ridiculed. The time it takes you to walk that damn dog is time stolen from organizing, a comrade might have said, and another would have added, The food that thing eats could feed five Vietnamese for a week. But now, whenever Jeffrey showed up with Red Dog, someone, or several people together, would romp around with him in dizzy excitement. It was strange, but the dogs, too, changed our lives."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

The Bookshelf

"The bookshelf was an immediate giveaway—every Weatherman read Malcolm X, the poetry of Ho Chi Minh, Amical Cabral, and Mari Sandoz's marvelous biography of Crazy Horse. Harry Haywood was on our reading list, and so was Amiri Baraka, C.L.R. James, and James and Grace Lee Boggs. And somewhere, usually the bedroom, was a modest, framed black-and-white photo of Che."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

Metaphors matter

"Metaphors matter: for human beings metaphors are casual—we function on the metaphors we ourselves fashion. We imagine a world, we create a reality, we bracket a piece of experience, and it becomes acute, hyperreal, dazzling, revealing, enabling, and also blinding, perhaps deadly. Metaphors set us in motion. Metaphors matter."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

nine weeks to a novel's first draft

I've had success getting full first drafts out in eight to ten weeks, and I once heard an extremely well published and recognized novelist say that he gets a short version of first draft out in about six weeks and then revises it over a couple years. I will often revise for longer than that. Anyway, Brooke Berman may have the help you need to get past the first-draft jitters and shakes.

Of Book Cards and Barbers

Will it be classic book cards, Bill Barber and Bobby Clarke, or beyond?

"The Tick Before" by Nadia Kalman

Indulge in "The Tick Before" at Jason Teal's Heavy Feather Review.