Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 134

violets and dandelions

There are so many different colors of violets, so many different shades of blue and purple, and then the white ones, and the white ones that are striped or speckled with purple, and the tiny yellow ones.

I picked three very purple ones:



Also, the most lion's-mane dandelion--so I drew a dandy lion.



I ran for a mile with wakanomori because I'm all out of shape, and that's a way to at least start on tackling that, and we heard catbirds and wood thrushes--summer is a-coming in! There were young stin...

A diversity of diversities--diversity in all directions

A while ago I read Open Mic: Riffs on Life Between Cultures in Ten Voices, a collection of short stories and reminiscences (including one in cartoon form) edited by Mitali Perkins. I talked a little bit about each one here on Goodreads, but I thought I'd say a little something here about the two stories that keep coming into my mind. One was G. Neri's "Under Berlin," a story in verse about an American family in Berlin, riding the subway there. Dad is black, Mom is Hispanic, big sister narrate...

"volcano culture"

IRIN has an article about "volcano culture in Indonesia (Dana MacLean "Reducing the Volcano Risk in Indonesia") The attitudes and beliefs described in it are similar (but not identical) to those in Kaya's culture in Pen Pal

Indigenous warning signs include: Smoke plumes (hot gas clouds from the summit's crater), small earthquakes, the descent of monkeys en masse from the hills, and lightning storms caused by the emission of ash into the atmosphere.

Experts say these represent only some of the s...

willow defies the thunders

The thunders gathered up their resentments and their slights in a towering bruised mass and stomped across the sky, slamming doors and grumbling, and everyone backed away at least two steps--at least out of arms' reach--and was respectfully quiet. Except for the sparrows. You know how they are. Told to shush, elbowed in the wing, given significant glances, they still had to whisper just one more time, had to say just that one last thing and then giggle about it.

The thunders were sure they wer...

Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck manifesto (post 2 of 2 GoW posts)

The healing angel read out chapter 14--a two-page chapter. Read it with feeling, read it like he was Martin Luther King in the pulpit, and it's written in a way that demands that style of reading:

The western land, nervous under the beginning change. The Western States, nervous as horses before a thunder storm. The great owners, striking at the immediate thing, the widening government, the growing labor unity; striking at new taxes, at plans; not knowing these things are results, not causes. R...

Grapes of Wrath: The Preacher (post 1 of 2 GoW posts)

The preacher in Grapes of Wrath articulates *exactly* how I want to spend the rest of my days:

"I'm gonna be near to folks. I ain't gonna try to teach 'me nothin'. I'm gonna try to learn. Gonna learn why the folks walks in the grass, gonna hear 'em talk, gonna hear 'em sing. Gonna listen to kids eatin' mush. Gonna hear husban' an' wife a-poundin' the mattress in the night. Gonna eat with 'em an learn." His eyes were wet and shining. "Gonna lay in the grass open an' honest with anybody that'll...

the greening of my Everglades, cataloguing the puddle portals

My Everglades are growing green



--and the swamp marigolds are coming up


I went out walking around sunrise this morning, and looked at the different worlds the puddles were offering.

A high-wire world



A land of shadowtrees



I also found a scrap of skin from a giant lizard--a dinosaur, maybe, or a dragon, steel reinforced. I wonder if this came off in a fight, or whether it was just shedding.

Following on the heels of Shveta Thakrar

Shveta Thakrar is a good person to follow--for one thing, she walks between many worlds, and if you follow along, you may travel to those worlds too.

Today, however, I'm following her as part of a blog tour on the theme of "my writing process." There are four questions to answer:

What am I working on?
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Why do I write what I do?
How does my writing process work?

You can check out Shveta's answers here , and while you're visiting her blog, you can take...

"Trigger Warning"--a verse and artwork

haikujaguar said that if she ever got a tattoo, it would look like this, which prompted me to write this little verse:

Trigger Warning

You are the warning
And I am the gun
They’re the shell casings
Numbers 3, 2 & 1
He’s the blackpowder
Awaiting the spark
Now where is the finger
To light up the dark?

magical bird

The healing angel and I went walking in the hemlock-and-beech-tree gorge of Holland Glen, whose river was extra full and rushing from rain the night before. There were tiny rivulets everywhere, water dripping from moss on rocks.

I darkened my eyebrows with some charcoal from someone's fire, and wet my lips with the water dripping from the moss. Then, a little way in, as we stood looking at the massive rock on the other side of the glen, came a loud and complicated warble of birdsong, from up,...