Author | Editor | Freelance
Things I’m feeling are: terror, excitement, cautious enthusiasm, and more terror. In today’s marketplace, being a writer means being an entrepreneur. There’s the blogs, there are interview to organize, photos to paw through, and web pages to update. This is the total opposite of sitting in my office, in candlelight, finishing the intimacies of my memoir.
Well, it’s happening folks. FurtherMo turned five this summer with very little pomp and circumstance. I feel like I’ve spent the last two years lost in my obsession to publish that i’ve ignored the roots and groundings of these journalistic posts. Maybe I should re-name this blog to FurtherMo: The Diaries.
In the afternoons we heard vivid and poignant lectures by Puerto Rican writers,activists, self-published, well travelled teachers and candles in their small but important circles there, fighting for justice, for identity, for freedom.
The story is mixed in shades of darkness and stormy seas of confusion and grief, following a path of color and culture as the main character, Mo, finds the freedom to liberate the heavies in a sort of reality check taking stock of what she really has left in this world.
Every time the world loses one more beautiful baby, I lose Tya again. And this is the third beautiful baby this year I’ve said goodbye to, before i got to say hello.
am tuning in to the rhythm of my own creative process. I am learning character from Hemingway and style from Didion, delving into wildness with cheryl strayed and sitting peacefully on the fences of British churchyards with Bill Bryson. I am asking myself the traveller’s questions of Pico Iyer and am suddenly indebted to Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty for their courage and bravery to get up every morning and write.
This got me thinking about the strange juxapositions that we find ourselves in throughout the course of our lives, and perhaps even beyond them. How does this happen: in one moment, I’m a king, and in the next, I’m a parking lot.
I gather books until my arms are full, and make my way down to the cash. Leila is hard to round up, now into a Ramona and Beezus collection on a shelf almost too tall for her. She hates to leave this magical place, where worlds open and close each time she twirls around.
I don’t know it is about the spring that sparks a fury of needing to get your year’s collection of items – important and non-important – categorized, thrown out, put in a box, or given away.
Mo Duffy Cobb 