Thursday, August 27, 2009

after betty

"I've always felt the gap between words and things, the impossibility of articulating what's really out there in the world, the strangeness of naming everything, including the self, how completely arbitrary it all is, and yet, at the same time, how it determines identities."
Siri Hustvedt in conversation with Thisbe Nissen
Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

Saturday, August 1, 2009

junction of amends

When she talks about meeting her birth parents, the first things Sandra McPherson mentions are the wildflowers. When the thirty-seven-year-old poet first approached her birth parents' Northern California house, she saw wildflowers and mushrooms spilling across the lawn and began staring at their whorls and shapes, naming them in her head. For her whole life, not knowing her own birth name, Sandra McPherson has been mesmerized by naming things their right names...
From "Junction of Amends; Sandra McPherson's Poetics of Adoption" by Jan VanStavern
Photo by Gareth McConnell Lyell Fall 2006