dec 13/BIKERUN

bike: 36 minutes
basement
outside: 2 degrees / feels like -6

Feels like -6 isn’t too cold for me, but I’m still trying to be careful with my right glute/hip and the snowy, uneven paths seemed like a bad idea. So, I biked and ran in the basement instead. While I biked, I watched the Brooks High School Girls Cross Country Championships. Wow, those girls are fast! And mentally tough. The hills on that course look awful.

As I finished my bike, RJP came down the stairs. She comes over almost every day (from her apartment) to say hi and see Delia. I took a break and we had a great talk about her latest success with knitting and using breathing patterns in deciding how often to knit and purl and the value of small goals that are designed to be about cumulative success instead of one big achievement. I mentioned SWOLF and asked her if she had any good acronyms for it:

Swimming with octopi, looking for fish
Sara wishes October lasted forever

run!: 1.25 miles
treadmill

Last week, Scott tried the treadmill and the belt wouldn’t move, but it did today. Hooray! And I ran without pain during or after the run. Excellent. Did my old treadmill routine of listening to the first few songs of Taylor Swift’s Reputation as I ran. I listened to “Look What You Made Me Do” on my cool down walk and decided that it would be a good song to listen to on the track while doing some speed work. Moderate pace in the verses, much faster in the chorus. I’ll have to try it next week.

Echoes, a Quarry and hybridizing echolocations

A few hours earlier, I came across and wonderful submissions call for the journal, Waxwing:

 Send us your work that hybridizes, blends, resists the boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art.

Waxwing wants to publish fiction and nonfiction that can stand alongside poetry: stories and essays where language is the primary concern. We seek writing that is like the characters and creatures we named the journal after—Daedalus made something that had never before existed, Icarus joyfully dared to do what hadn’t been done, and the eponymous birds seem to be what they’re not. We’re interested in narratives that risk, that come close to failing but land on the other side, not in the sea, and like the red tips of feathers that look like sealing wax, we love flourishes. We’re not interested in virtuosity that pleases the masses, but we do crave intensity, and stories that feel a little dangerous. We seek to showcase the particular and the peculiar, the odd and the revelatory—we want to read stories and essays that make us feel like we are learning something, even if it’s something we can’t quite explain. 

Waxwing Submissions

I’m trying to put something together from my manuscript and my echolocation project. At the end of my draft, I have a piece titled, “Echoes: a Quarry.” It is a list of all of the one, two, and three syllable words from my poems. I collected them and used them to create my rock, river, and air echo/chant poems. I want to do some thing with sound (me reading the words altogether, and online — Scott said he could do write code that would scramble up the words to make new chants) and with visuals (a map locating the echoes. I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to think through it.

An experiment with quarrying words. Find all of the one, two, and three syllable words in a favorite poem. Turn them into a new poem that offers echoes of the original.

Before I got my eye put out/ Emily Dickinson

My poem:

Today stars
are in 

motion, in-
cautious

of birds, Sun.
I see

my way split
before

the noon sky.
Tell me,
dead eyes (mine) —
finite,

dipping be-
tween soul’s

meadow and
heart’s forest —
when it
is safer
to look.