Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 145

tiny landscapes

You are in a plane, flying high above pine-clad, rocky peaks . . .



It's a land where surely bighorn sheep roam, and eagles. . .

The sad story of the eastern wood peewee and his punishment

urbpan pointed out this great site, Bird and Moon, which has this super poster of birds and mnemonics for their songs and calls. I love the art:


I got to thinking there had to be a story in there, with all those phrases, so I put some of them together and added the calls of other birds in where necessary, and . . . here it is. I've made links to pages where you can hear the call of each bird, so you can decide for yourself if they're *really* saying what I (and the bird poster) claim they're s...

the good thief

Today in church we had one of my favorite Bible readings,1 the one with Jesus and the two criminals, the three of them in the process of dying their horrible deaths together.

Now one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying,
"Are you not the Christ?
Save yourself and us."
The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply,
"Have you no fear of God,
for you are subject to the same condemnation?
And indeed, we have been condemned justly,
for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes...

Messages in bottles

It turns out that messages in bottles get picked up fairly regularly; if you do a search, you'll find all sorts of interesting stories. I came across one today: in 1977 a ten-year-old English boy put a message in a bottle and threw it in the North Sea. A ten-year-old German girl found it, wrote back, and the two have been friends ever since.

I've added a messages-in-bottles page to the Pen Pal website; I'll have to remember to update it as new stories turn up.

A question

If you were to put a mes...

back cover copy

... is set! And I'm doing a final run-through of the text before I dump it into draft2digital and CreateSpace. And then! I will have to find reviewers. And THEY will tell us--me--everyone--what kind of a book this is.

the shadow-crowded dark

Because the moon is full, it's a thin sort of dark, beyond the protective glow of the sodium lights that line the predawn streets. Thin, but even that thin darkness is crowded with shadows, shadows and more shadows. Each time Marcy's headlights hits one of those streetlight poles, a long, black shadow sprouts from the pole's base, turns like an analogue clock hand round that base as the car nears, and then, oh then. It doesn't fade away, as it would have in Marcy's childhood. No, instead it c...

The Akwesasne Freedom School

Language is an amazingly powerful thing--it's not for nothing that we conceive our deities as creating the world with language--or that we also imbue the spoken word with the power to summon, curse, and destroy. There's no more effective way to kill a culture (short of genocide--that works pretty well, too) than to destroy its language, whereas if you can preserve language, you preserve the possibility of access to all sorts of other aspects of culture.

All through the nineteenth and twentieth...

The Ahkwesáhsne Freedom School

Language is an amazingly powerful thing--it's not for nothing that we conceive our deities as creating the world with language--or that we also imbue the spoken word with the power to summon, curse, and destroy. There's no more effective way to kill a culture (short of genocide--that works pretty well, too) than to destroy its language, whereas if you can preserve language, you preserve the possibility of access to all sorts of other aspects of culture.

All through the nineteenth and twentieth...

The Akwesásne Freedom School

Language is an amazingly powerful thing--it's not for nothing that we conceive our deities as creating the world with language--or that we also imbue the spoken word with the power to summon, curse, and destroy. There's no more effective way to kill a culture (short of genocide--that works pretty well, too) than to destroy its language, whereas if you can preserve language, you preserve the possibility of access to all sorts of other aspects of culture.

All through the nineteenth and twentieth...

sunset, moonrise

I was tracking the sun, following its bright trail, hoping to trap that bright disk . . .



. . . And when I turned around, there was the moon.



Or is it two moons? The streetlamp and the moon look like siblings.