Twenty years ago, I was paralyzed with depression and its sidekick: fear. A bad marriage and a worse divorce had reduced me to almost nothing. After years of having been told that I was not an artist, I had quit painting, and I had been silenced from the years of having been shamed about my…
Month: August 2022
John Lithgow’s Picture Book Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo is Fabulous–Especially When It Is Performed with Actual Music
In my most recent search for the best picture books for picture book writers to study, I stumbled upon Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo: Never Play Music Right Next to the Zoo is a story about a boy who falls asleep at a concert “right next to the zoo.” While he was…
Emotional Bankruptcy Caused by Alienation from Nature
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Estes associates Nature with the Wild Woman Self. She describes her childhood, during which she grew up and into nature. “ I was raised up near the Michigan state line, surrounded by woodlands, orchards, and farmland and near the Great Lakes. There, thunder and lightning were my main nutrition….
Tillie Olsen and Silences: Writer’s Block
Tillie Olsen wrote Silences which describes the periods during which the creator becomes incapable of creating. For a painter, it is a time of blank, white canvases. Writers might call this Writer’s Block. In my case, the silences that Olsen describes are normally caused by depression or by becoming too busy to hear myself think…
Popular, I Want to Be Popular – I’m Catching A Wicked Case of Stripes
Down here in the South, folks go back to school in August. I think that this trend is a leftover behavior from long before my initial school days, which began in the 1950s. I grew up in the middle of a cotton patch, and the primary source of my community’s sustenance came from harvesting the…
The Little Red Hen – A Picture Book Classic from1918
Character Study Show Don’t Tell The Little Red Hen Retold and Illustrated by FLORENCE WHITE WILLIAMS The Saalfield Publishing Company Chicago – Akron, Ohio – New York PRINTED IN U. S. A. COPYRIGHT, 1918 BY THE SAALFIELD PUBLISHING COMPANY Little Red Hen lived in a barnyard. She spent almost all of her time walking…
Papa Please Get the Moon for Me by Eric Carle, The Rolling Stones, William Blake, and Buddhist Yearning
In his series of videos about Buddhism and Modern Psychology, Duke University’s Robin Wright says that The Rolling Stones song I Can’t Get No Satisfaction expresses the crux of the first Buddhist Noble Truth and may have been one of the most Buddhist of the more modern songs of our culture. He says that the first noble…
Loss of Intuition Is A Centuries-Old Problem for Both Women and Men
Romanticism is a Cultural Movement that is almost 300 years old. It began with the teachings of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 1700s. I discovered Romanticism when my 10th-grade English teacher introduced me to William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. Blake’s Experience is a state of alienation and emotional exile. I grew up in…
Loss of Inner Light in Women Who Run With the Wolves – Learn to See in the Dark
Over the past week, I have explored the theme of darkness in literature. In the Bible, we are told that in the beginning, the world was nothing but darkness. There was no moon. There was no sun. We are told that water moved across the darkness at that time, and therefore, I imagine that in…
Stellaluna by Jannell Cannon
Stellaluna by Jannell Cannon The illustrations for Stellaluna are incandescent. The fruit bats glow against their blue backgrounds. Like the very moon itself, Stellaluna’s mother is a light that illuminates the night sky. The Moon & the Stars — Things That Light the Night While we might often associate the nighttime with blackness–with total darkness–Stellaluna…