"...when I was in my very first apartment in San Francisco, there was this banging sound outside the window, and I said to myself, Well, you can get really upset about this, or you can start to think of it as the sound of the city, another kind of music... " artist Lynn Marie Kirby, in Bomb.

This answer from @lidiamiles.bsky.social is the very greatest answer you will ever hear to the question "What's the elevator pitch for your book?"

"A boundary isn’t about what the other person will or won’t do. A boundary is a contract with yourself." Lori Gottlieb in NYT's Ask The Therapist.

"My personal preference is writing that devastates me." --Jeannine Ouellette, Writing in the Dark.

"...to live in California meant to understand that disaster could strike at any instant, which is to say that there is nothing we can count on, nothing that will guarantee safe passage through the world." Gorgeous piece on place, fate, character, and fire by @davidulin.bsky.social in the NYT.

Los Angeles might need an online registry where folks with empty guest houses could offer temp. shelter to those fleeing the fires. Free, obv. Maybe a church or synagogue could launch it; the county could publicize it. Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Does it already exist?

"Back in April, while savoring two acceptances in a single week, I warned myself that pouring rain creates the illusion that drought is over; but drought is a writer’s true norm." @aimeeliu.bsky.social

Of all the extraordinary things to learn this morning: Heidi W. Durrow put a headstone on Nella Larsen's grave.

"The poet Anne Carson has said that if 'prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.'" @dwightgarner.bsky.social on the poetry of @percivaleverett.bsky.social ("Count on Everett for a sting in the tail...A pebble in every shoe"). Ordering.

"...two days after Thompson was killed, two migrant teenagers were stabbed in Lower Manhattan. The culprits asked if they spoke English. The teenagers indicated they did not. They were then stabbed. One was killed. No ensuing nationwide manhunts."

"'You don’t look like you grew up in a trailer park.' I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that in my life..." @samydunn.bsky.social on the trailer she lived in as a girl, the barb of the "trailer trash" myth and why mobile homes could solve so much. bit.ly/3ZLYZ3K

I like these questions a lot--obviously for life and I confess for novel writing--and I appreciate @samydunn.bsky.social's comment (thx for posting first, Sam).

It's Tomas Tranströmer, "The Blue House"--and the lines that kept echoing were:

"I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real...
"We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route."

Any of you ever read a poem about a "sister life," the life you might have led had you made other choices? The poet's sister life haunts her; it's like a ghost ship that trails her, something like that. I've been trying to find this gorgeous poem again for years. (Google's hopeless.)

Listening to Toni Morrison's resonant rasp as she reads Song of Solomon. 13th read but this is the first one auditory. My mother gave me this book when it first came out. Every time I finish reading I miss Pilate almost as much as I miss her.

Rereading All Fours by Miranda July with a pen to ferret out what she's doing, and it's dazzling--the way she swings between concrete detail and untethered thought-balloons about life, death, the universe. This book is so much more than a "menopause novel."