A corvid every day

This beautiful creature is "Wisdom Seeker" cast bronze by Tony Angell found randomly in the WAshington State Convention Center. Nice corvid sighting!

If you are participating in a panel or other information exchange type of event, unless you are actually reading from the text of a story or poem, which by its very nature depends on an exact sequence of language, please do not simply read from a paper you wrote without looking up, and especially do not read from a computer screen containing the paper you wrote. I know you might be nervous or you might worry that you will forget something or you like the way you put written sentences together. I don't care. Don't do it. Write the paper, fine. But use it as a prop not a shield. Make eye contact with your audience. Vary your tone. Simplify your long convoluted sentences. Also, do not put the exact text of what you are saying on a projector for me to read along with you. This actually distances me from you even more. You do not even need to have a visual aid, but if you do, make it something that illustrates or supplements or highlights or adds color to what you are saying. The exception, again, is if you are reading text that I somehow need to grok in its exact form, like a poem or part of a story we are going to analyze together. And finally, if you are given a 10 minute slot, do not take 20 minutes. (My apologies for maybe probably haven broken the last one once or twice in my life. I admit it, editing is very hard.)

Day 3 was a good day, better than I expected in the morning when I woke up melancholy and small, but it did make me cranky. It was, notably, the only gray and drizzly day I had in Seattle. There were good ideas for non traditional readings, quotes from Rimbaud, conceptual anti-workshop models, and some good stuff on teaching flash fiction. I had impromptu lunch and market browsing with Nora from New York, who is a friend triangulated through writing conference acquaintances (I will let you try to figure out what that means), and had drinks and dinner with Paula and her poet friends. I failed to ever see the monster Frankie. Now, home.

these are place holders for later, posting on the fly:

Making play/book writing notes in the chair in a quiet corner window above the busy street reminded me of the chairs in the 1804 room in the now defunct Baker Center in Athens, where I used to go read as a teenager. I like chairs in windows.

Lunch at the Persian place in the market with Nora 

I dreamt of the gerbils. They climbed up my dress and kissed me.