WHAT a great faculty list: Bread Loaf 2005. Applications for general applicants are due March 19, 2005 and for those seeking financial aid, March 1.
on our way to 2005 with the industrious clock
(note: he gets two because I just found him and I am in love with these poems)
I am baffled that someone would commission a clone of a dead pet to the tune of $50k, but apparently this is exactly what a woman in Texas has done and the cloning of pets does not stop there:
The California company that produced the cat, Genetic Savings and Clone, says it hopes to produce the world’s first genetically cloned dog by next May.
What bothers me about this story is that $50K could help a lot of animals living in shelters, not to mention what it could do for children who don’t have enough food to eat.
In some way, it reminds me of that P.D. James book in which infertility amongst humans was so widespread that people started walking kittens around in baby carriages. Gawd, what was the name of that book?
Some of the instructors and special guests for Squaw Valley’s 2005 writers’ workshop have been listed on the web site (although it seems there is still more info forthcoming). They include: Elissa Schappell, Mark Childress, Sands Hall, Carol Edgarian, Tom Jenks, Alan Cheuse, Amy Tan, Diane Johnson and many more, including some to be announced (and the poetry workshop has Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell–wow!). I had such a kick-ass revelatory time last year that I think I’m going to apply again and see what happens. Who’s with me? Submission deadline is May 10, 2005 so there’s plenty of time to decide and polish up a story or a chapter.
by Myfanwy Collins
(That winter, we walked through the snowy fields just behind the trees. We followed the fence line and laughed at how far our feet sank. We did not worry about being shot by an orange vested hunter).
The sheep farmer was quiet and young and he could have been my friend. Though he and I never spoke, I heard the voices of his animals every day and every night. I listened for them. The coy-dogs stayed by his fence and sang us (the farmer, me and you and the sheep) to sleep at night until we were startled, all of us, by the ringing gunshot followed by the absence of song.
I grew a tall garden of corn and sunflowers, tomatoes and pumpkins and lettuce and cucumbers and radishes all in tidy raised rows. More vegetables than we would ever need. So many that some rotted on the vine. But the garden was patiently weeded each day.
And there were mourning doves that sat on the roof and watched me take in my laundry from the line in that moment that was perfection. You were standing with the hood up on your car but we both stopped, looked up at the roofline and waited until the wind picked up. Nothing was ever the same after that.
And there was the sound of the bird in the woods that is only in the woods. HEE hee hee hee, HEE hee hee hee and who are you? And who are you?
And there were the Northern Lights – the Aurora Borealis twice that summer – late and so high in the sky that I almost drove off the road. What is it? What is that?
(They say not to whistle when you see the lights or the spirits will cut off your head and play ball with it).
The stars and black, black sky, the peepers and the quiet make me wonder what I am doing here in this land of weed whackers and lawn mowers and engines always engines burning and buzzing and burning and buzzing and making a short life shorter.
But here and now it is spring again.
The daffodils rise, wetted with your blood. They raise their happy faces to the sun and say, here I am. The grass greens and the tulips push their way up and out.
The forsythia is in bloom.
This is what I remember now.
Pigs is a must read. Here’s just a bit to tempt you:
I’ve been conversing, as a new pig owner, with a friend who has many of them and has had them for years. They know that they’re the bottom of the food chain, she tells me. They don’t bite much and they’re not well-clawed and they haven’t a rabbit’s strong kicking legs. They’re down to two choices: run and hide, or if you can’t, stay stock still and perhaps no one will notice that you’re edible.
While I can’t imagine Siddhartha on my PDA (well, I don’t actually own a PDA but whatever), I’m sure someone would enjoy it. If that person is you, you might want to check out manybooks.net–a site which contains more than 10,000 free ebooks (free, I’m assuming, because they are past copyright). It’s a nice, easy to use site which also features ebooks in many different languages including: Esperanto, Latin, Portugese, Swedish and Tagalog.
World’s smallest baby ready to go home–first of all I love things that are labeled “the world’s” or “first ever” because the FACT is we cannot know for a FACT that this is the world’s smallest baby. But damn, she is one small baby and I hope she’s going to be okay:
A baby who weighed less than a can of soda when she was born by Caesarean section three months ago is nearly ready to be released from the hospital. She is believed to be the smallest baby in the world ever to survive.
here’s the whole story
Helloooo… sorry for my continuous parade of self-promotion lately but the first of my quarterly columns is now live at Moondance.
The ants came in droves. Not like a sea or a carpet as one might think, but more like a mass or a tumor. And what I didn’t know then was that if you squished them, more would come to their aid. When ants die, they emit a scent that draws other ants to them. Then they pick apart the pieces of their dead comrades and carry them home.
read the whole thing here
thanks!
The Snow Monkey Fifth Anniversary Issue # 15 & 16 (which contains a piece by me called “Wooden Bowl”) is now available for order.
It just strikes me as odd that in offering an alternative OS to Windows, Linspire would pair up with Wal-Mart (from Fast Company):
Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors.To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in
favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
I have never stepped foot in a Wal-Mart and I hope I never will. I do fear, though, that at some point in the future I will have no choice as all other stores will have gone out of business.
myfanwy collins 