Clare Consultation, LLCWhy Write?
I’m sitting in a coffee shop. It’s high summer in Portland. There’s the usual backdrop: coffee beans surrendering their abundance to the grinder, barista utensils clattering into motion and that burst of steam that, today, sounds most like the explosive exhale of a kid who’s held her breath as long as she can. Threading through is the canned music. The current crooner observing: “Everyone is lonely.” I’ve just looked back on my… Read More
Re: My Profession’s Role in Torture
I’m a professor of psychological and cultural studies. Gary Snyder is a poet and essayist. In an interview in the Paris Review, Snyder spoke of writing as his work. He spoke about integrity – in his work as a writer, and to my mind, immediately relevant to my profession – Psychology. This is what Snyder’s interviewer asked: You’ve written, “Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing… Read More
Stories and Specialty
I just spent four days in the company of poets and writers. Well-published storytellers like Naomi Shihab Nye, Luis Urrea, Kim Stafford, Teresa Jordan, Gary Ferguson — and hundreds more, published and not. No matter the notoriety, each one wove images into stories — tales to entertain, to instruct, to push beyond whatever bounds any of us imagines. All week these stories echoed across the wide meadow in the northeastern corner of Oregon… Read More
On the Cusp of 2014 – Change and What Endures
Soon the calendar will shift for another roll through dates, through seasons and all the moments we have no way of knowing from here. Each of us lives in our own contagion of this following that. The unavoidable change that is living itself can sometimes feel unnerving — or at least the anticipation of it, the impossibility I already mentioned of knowing completely any change before it happens. I’ve been writing this… Read More
Unplugged — a guest blog
Gary Ferguson is a writer. His subject over the past 30 years has the natural world and the relationships we have with it as human beings. His setting has most often been Yellowstone National Park, but here, in the first of two guest blogs, Gary tells of his three months with 14-17 year-olds in the desert wilderness of Utah. People living these years are change-on-legs as far as my memory and observation… Read More
Montana’s Red Lodge
Yep. On the road again. This time listening to the wide stretch of country called Montana. Right now I’m sitting with the morning sun where it falls across this tooled leather couch and onto pine floors reclaimed from beneath years of inhabitants, each leaving behind their layers of linoleum, carpet and, in the bedroom where I’m sleeping — astroturf. It took plenty of my friends Joe and Roxanna’s work to call these wooden boards… Read More
Write Brain Change — guest blog by Dave Jarecki
Back in October I got a call from Dave Jarecki. He had been assigned to me by the Lewis & Clark College Chronicle — the alumni magazine of the college where I’ve been a professor for well more than 20 years. I was happy to know my school was pleased with the publication of 100 VOICES – AMERICANS TALK ABOUT CHANGE and wanted to have an article following its release. Dave and I… Read More