Re: New ways of understanding the world
Posted by
Steve Smith on
Dec 01, 2020; 9:55pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/New-ways-of-understanding-the-world-tp7599664p7599734.html
Nick -
Oh, thank you steve. I was afraid it might
be a bad dream.
Sometimes I think your mom knew my mom.
I like how you write, Steve. I wish I
could find you a good agent.
thanks for the kind words. it definitely felt like a bad dream
to a 10 year old!
A good agent/editor would be key if I had any such aspirations.
I am definitely an ama-tuer and would probably fail miserably if I
tried to write for any more specific purpose than you find here.
My technical proposals and the like may be a testimony to how much
better I write when I have only my own self-imposed goals and
constraints!
Mary is a published poet and when she moved here 3 years ago had
the body of a memoir which she completed and I became her first
reader... she writes well... but even after hiring a "coach"
does not have a submittable manuscript. She acknowledges that she
may have written her memoir more as therapy than as something
worthy of sharing widely.
My mother was raised by older parents... her father's first wife
died in the 1918 influenza and she had 5 older siblings (3 of them
half's), her mother was abandoned with two young boys by her own
first husband who was never seen again. Her mother died when
she was about 21... and while they lived rural (Kentucky
subsistence farmers), her city-aunt, married to an MD took my mom
in during her elementary school years (age 6-12, depth of the
Depression). They offered her the kind of poverty-of-spirit that
only the most strict (if of modest financial means) Scottish
Methodists could conjure (budgeting one square of toilet paper per
event when she was allowed a full-page from Sears&Roebuck at
home?). Her aunt (and the MD husband) were also older... having
just shipped their own young-adults out of the house when they
moved her in. So my mom may well have been raised by parents
who were your grandparents age. My mother is turning 91 next
week. She is in an assisted living in Tucson which manages COVID
well but not perfectly... she voted for Trump, twice... her TV is
stuck on Fox News... she used to be very progressive (by my
expectations/standards), all I can think is that she (and my dad
who passed nearly 10 years ago now) simply "got old" and let fear
take over from compassion. I am thankful she made me read/write
(and 'rithmatic and geography) above and beyond what the public
schools offered... she was also a self-taught landscape
painter... I found her *first* oil painting when we cleaned out
the house after my father's death... it was (literally) a
paint-by-number ( I can still smell the linseed-oil as the paint
dried/cured over weeks before she moved on to acrylics). She
eventually found watercolors and a hand/eye/voice in that medium
that transcended the literal/representational style her
paint-by-number beginnings gave her.
- Steve
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.comarchives:
http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC
http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/