My Latest Embroidery 🪡 “Weavers Of Life”, 8” Radius, December 2021. A Reminder To Remember Those

From Sherwood Ren Faire, at the Sky Kings Falconry show - a Eurasian Eagle Owl! One of the largest Owl species in the world, this guy was very talkative and very charming!

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

Underwater forest with tadpoles, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada

photograph by Eiko Jones

bird doodles (first post in here)

Unidentified orbweaver spider, Araneidae

Photographed in Singapore by Nicky Bay // Website // Facebook

Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

going insane over the fact that helena's father never realised it was helly using the OTC until she literally stood on stage and screamed it out, but irving immediately knew something was up when helena came back pretending to be helly. the fact helena clearly studied helly's interactions with mark, recognised the significance of the attraction between them and tried to replicate it as well as she could, but she never managed to convincingly do the same with irving because she just couldn't recognise that kind of love as existing, let alone mattering- a familial bond, a relationship that rhymes with a father figure. she never expected it. why would irving pay attention to who helly is? why would he notice? why would he care? but of course he does. helly was never cruel. fetid moppet.

i’m going to burst into tears. such a hauntingly stupid and wonderful phrase to immortalize somewhere. LOOK AT PIttbert!

Something dark, crossing over.

In the first poetry workshop I ever took my professor said we could write about anything we wanted except for two things: our grandparents and our dogs. She said she had never read a good poem about a dog. I could only remember ever reading one poem about a dog before that point—a poem by Pablo Neruda, from which I only remembered the lines “We walked together on the shores of the sea/ In the lonely winter of Isla Negra.” Four years later I wrote a poem about how when I was a little girl I secretly baptized my dog in the bathtub because I was afraid she wouldn’t get into heaven. “Is this a good poem?” I wondered. The second poetry workshop, our professor made us put a bird in each one of our poems. I thought this was unbelievably stupid. This professor also hated when we wrote about hearts, she said no poet had ever written a good poem in which they mentioned a heart. I started collecting poems about hearts, first to spite her, but then because it became a habit I couldn’t break. The workshop after that, our professor would tell us the same story over and over about how his son had died during a blizzard. He would cry in front of us. He never told us we couldn’t write about anything, but I wrote a lot of poems about snow. At the end of the year he called me into his office and said, “looking at you, one wouldn’t think you’d be a very good writer” and I could feel all the pity inside of me curdling like milk. The fourth poetry workshop I ever took my professor made it clear that poets should not try to engage with popular culture. I noticed that the only poets he assigned were men. I wrote a poem about that scene in Grease 2 where a boy takes his girlfriend to a fallout shelter and tries to get her to have sex with him by tricking her into believing that nuclear war had begun. It was the first poem I ever published. The fifth poetry workshop I ever took our professor railed against the word blood. She thought that no poem should ever have the word “blood” in it, they were bloody enough already. She returned a draft of my poem with the word blood crossed out so hard the paper had torn. When I started teaching poetry workshops I promised myself I would never give my students any rules about what could or couldn’t be in their poems. They all wrote about basketball. I used to tally these poems when I’d go through the stack I had collected at the end of each class. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 poems about basketball. This was Indiana. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore. I told the class, “for the next assignment no one can write about basketball, please for the love of god choose another topic. Challenge yourselves.” Next time I collected their poems there was one student who had turned in another poem about basketball. I don’t know if he had been absent on the day I told them to choose another topic or if he had just done it to spite me. It’s the only student poem I can still really remember. At the time I wrote down the last lines of that poem in a notebook. “He threw the basketball and it came towards me like the sun”

Kendall Roy - Denial is a river

this edit on tiktok