Tag: authors

Sunday Sundries: sometimes I dream in paisley

I finished a mystery I was reading on Friday; I have unlimited respect for Louise Penny and her work. Her characters are like friends I rely on for humor, sanity, intelligence, integrity, and compassion. The most recent novel’s written with her usual deft ability to lure readers back to a world they’ve visited for twenty books. The plots can be heart-stopping, sometimes heartbreaking, but there’s comfort that somehow, all will be well in the end. This time was no exception except that The Grey Wolf ventured a little too close to a reality that frequently costs me sleep and peace of mind. Maybe because a lot of the current real world exhibits very little humor, sanity, intelligence, integrity, and compassion.

The next novel in the series is due by year’s end, and I hope to be a little better prepared in heart and mind. Maybe reality will cooperate and improve, as well.

After finishing Penny’s book, I looked forward to a very different novel for my next selection, the fifth in a historical fantasy/supernatural series, Deborah Harkness’s The Black Bird Oracle. I was racing through it before it came to a natural stopping place at my bedtime. I fell asleep easily, but the last section I’d read made its vivid way into my dreams with its concept of “bottled memories.” Literally, a human (or ghost, or witch, or vampire, etc.) can choose to pour their memories into a bottle and seal them inside before…well, whatever comes next.

What came next for me was a 4:30 a.m. wide-awakeness and seal-breaking on some of my own bottled memories. That’s how I came to visualize and then create the collection of prompts on the photo below. Over the next few days, I plan to send messages (from my unsealed paisley memory bottle) to the people the items are connected to. I won’t name names. I’ll try to mask as many of the identifying details as I can, though many of them have been referenced before. I figure I’m pretty safe because this site hasn’t been getting a lot of action, including from people familiar with my past.


There’s probably no point pretending The Guitar from my paisley memory bottle isn’t obvious. I’ll record what will always be the most painful of words to my late friend: “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. Nothing would have kept me away if I’d had any idea you needed me. I hope you know. I hope you feel the way love defies any attempt to suppress or hide it. I’ll love you every day that I breathe, and beyond. –Becky”

Except for one, maybe two others, I think the rest of the letters may be… a bit more acerbic than that one. Stay tuned for my random pre-dawn ruminations about: Iron, Packet of Letters 1, Going Steady Ring, Anniversary!, Mustard Packet, Earrings, Salmon Tie, Pickup, Packet of Letters 2, Scrabble®, Karma Button.

The drama


Another one using a prompt from The Magic Words. The character is not in the relationship he thought he was in. Is his perspective right, or is he only coming up with an answer that keeps him comfortable? This is the prompt.

And this is what “he” wrote.

Breakup Poem

You ask me if I am crushed.
But I am not crushed.
I swore you were the lead in my life.
I hoped you were the principal.
Now I walk out of this broken alliance
and see the play for the first time
and know that you are not the play.
I am the lead,
and I am the principal,
and I am the play.

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Placeholder on Hump Day

Wednesday got away from me–a whole lot going on at Houndstooth Hall at the moment. I read a stunning poem by Lynne Shapiro in Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, and it inspired me to begin a character poem, but I’ll need to finish the poem later and will return to this post to add it when it’s ready. (ETA: Done! See bottom of this post.)

In the meantime, this is Shapiro’s poem.

Your Dead Mother

Dangles from the sky
Like a slim moon
Strung on a string
Silvery blue dress
Pleated like a curtain
Shimmers in your
Room at night
As cocktail gloves
And long fingers
Reach down to caress
Your sleepy head

Composing my poem also made me think of this sculpture that was our late friend Steve’s, which always has a place in our home.

ETA:
Below is the poem I wrote using the word list and title from Write The Poem. It’s a scene that’s maybe two novels away in the Neverending Saga, though it’s been planned a long time. It’s as if whoever put this list of words together could see into the future. My poem is the reason I thought of Steve’s sculpture.

Nighttime
Darkness holds a secret.
He’s in his fourth decade of keeping it.
Less than two decades since four collaborators
joined him in the shadows.
Sleepless, he keeps vigil over her in the dim room.
He wants to whisper,
“She is the one who cradles you in the moon’s crescent.
Even when the sky is moonless, she is there.”
His silence ensures she will not become wakeful.
The black secret will not touch her.

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Mindful Monday

I used Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words poetry prompts book to speak in the voice of a Neverending Saga character whose trust has been broken. My characters’ lives may be radically different from mine, but I think their voices come so willingly to me because we share fragments of our identities, emotions, and experiences.

This was the prompt:

This is my character’s poem. I don’t reuse the same nouns or verbs (which Fasano says is fine–better to write for the poem than to a formula).

Mistake Poem

This is how a connection persists,
by losing its expectations.
This is how a falseness roots,
by falling in middle ground.
This is how a trust erodes,
by stumbling on concessions.
I am what I am, a willing accomplice
that loses, that falls, that stumbles,
and then that rises.
Look at me. Look at my breakthrough.
This is how a connection fractures.

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Sunday Sundries


Sometimes, it’s all about poetry. Bottom left, my three new sticker books with words and phrases that can be arranged into poetry or thoughts. The Magnetic Poetry™ refrigerator tin that holds words and also provides a fridge “door’s” magnetic surface for assembling them. A Write The Poem book that offers many writing prompts. Three works of contemporary poetry to get me away from my go-to poets like Dickinson, Frost, etc., and read (or re-read) and enjoy Lynn Domina’s Corporal Works; Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems with over 101 contributors; and Aaron Fagan’s Garage Poems. Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words: Simple Poetry Prompts That Unlock the Creativity in Everyone.

Finally, my Inspire Journal, because I intend to use all these different means to write a poem every day this week which directly corresponds to the voices or experiences of characters in the Neverending Saga.


Today, I used The Healing Words Kit™ from Magnetic Poetry™ to pull words and arrange them on a magnetic board for one of the four main voices in my series. In case you have trouble reading from the photo, her poem is:

you would see or listen to
only
beauty of body and voice
but I am
wisdom courage
grace compassion
heart love
so our time is no more
goodbye
free
I can be my whole self

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Photo Friday, No. 948

Current Photo Friday theme: Tiled.

Had a little fun with this theme by using several of my own tiles (the New Orleans tile was my mother’s), ringed by Sowminoes™ ceramic dominos, along with Scrabble tiles and artist Jeff Fisher’s cover illustration for British writer Louis de Bernières’ 1994 novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. (My theme this week has been books.) Some sources say the cover was inspired by the art of Matisse; another speaks of how the figures are like those on Mediterranean pottery. I read the book several years ago (I think it’s excellent, by the way), and remembered as soon as I saw the Photo Friday theme how the illustration always made me think of old tiles, as well as the way the cover figures are like “keys” to people and things in the novel.

(P.S. You’ve now seen your Daily Cow, plus a bonus cow!)

Thursday thoughts

One interesting thing about revisiting these books I haven’t read or read about in a long time is remembering why I once deliberated about whether to write my Masters thesis about the fiction of either Tom Robbins or Larry McMurtry, and in no small part, it had to do with their female characters. Though I relished the language of one author, and the narrative skills of the other, I intended to address how they wrote women characters, and my points were not all valentines toward either writer. That had little to do with enjoying their novels nor any sense of conventional “morality,” and also considered the time and culture in which the novels were written.

I think it’s an important part of reading that nothing should become “truth” to us at the expense of accessing our brain, our senses, our instincts, our better feelings. It’s wise to question even those books we’re told are indisputable truth. As a writer myself, with a deep love and understanding of stories and storytellers, I believe there’s no.such.thing.

I don’t have the energy to tackle a discussion of the means used to indoctrinate and control humans. I’ll always believe that the more we read, from the contrary and challenging and unsettling to the comforting and amusing and entertaining–all of it–the better off we are.

Oddest of all to me is the way book banning movements so often begin with people/readers believing the lie that “no one is banning books.”

How do we make love stay?


Let’s begin with this photo of my Dan Fogelberg 1983 Greatest Hits album that was lost in the Harvey flood. I’m pretty sure I have all his work that was drowned on the CD collection I bought, but it’ll never be the same as lying in a candlelit room and listening to the albums, staring at his photo on the cover, and traveling through all the journeys he took me to all the places in my imagination.

Though it was an album of greatest hits, it also had a couple of new songs on it, and one of those was “Make Love Stay.” I wondered from the first moment I heard it if it was inspired by Tom Robbins’s novel Still Life With Woodpecker. Of all his novels, this is one of two that I’ve read so many times they have a permanent residence in my brain. Because of this book, for years, I kept a sealed pack of Camel cigarettes in one desk drawer after another in every home, school, and business office I was in.

From the novel, this excerpt:


“Who knows how to make love stay?”

1. Tell love you are going to Junior’s Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a memento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a mustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”

Though I can in no way approach the kind of writing Tom Robbins creates, I know with every fiber of my being that the heart of one character I created would sing when he read this–and he’d read it over and over.

I think that passage probably had that same effect on Dan Fogelberg. In his own words:

Fogelberg later described “Make Love Stay” in the liner notes to a retrospective album as a “sinuous piece written around a chapter of Tom Robbins’ Still Life with Woodpecker”and as “a musical question that, unfortunately, eludes me still.”

Tiny Tuesday!

Today, Debby and I had a couple of errands to take care of, but we got a late start. My brain had spent all the time I should have been sleeping last night rerunning old conflicts and disappointments, among other things–until 5 AM. That left me dragging all day, having had only around four hours of sleep.

By the time she and I pulled back into Houndstooth Hall, we were caught in a torrential thunderstorm. We sat in the driveway, talking and listening to music. Finally, the rain abated enough that I could use my umbrella to keep from getting drenched while I opened gates, backed the car into the carport, and we could both hurry inside our homes.

From the Tiny Pleasures book (above right), this page reminded me that the smell of rain was indeed nice, though the dogs were more than ready for their hemp chewies that keep them calm during thunder. I had to change into dry clothes–my third outfit of the day–and dry my hair. The whole thing, from errands to dodging rain, made me late to compose my Black History Month post to Instagram, though I think I actually did my Blue Sky book-cover post sometime in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

This evening, I was thinking more about author Tom Robbins. It will take me a while to get through Another Roadside Attraction. Since Robbins and his books have turned into this week’s theme, I decided to let my mind wander and see where it took me. One place was the memory of a 1987 movie called Made In Heaven. The principals were Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis, as star-crossed lovers who had to find themselves and each other during lives on earth and in heaven.

This was not the cover of my original VHS copy, which was dreamier and more romantic. When I got rid of my VHS tapes, I bought this DVD. It still has the shrink-wrap on it. The reason I thought of the movie was because it’s filled with cameo appearances: Debra Winger, who was married to Hutton at the time, made an uncredited appearance as a character named Emmett. Others who popped up in the movie included Neil Young, Tom Petty, Ric Ocasek, Ellen Barkin–and one character called The Toymaker was played by none other than writer Tom Robbins. I remember how that delighted me the first time I saw the film.
ETA: I finally had time to watch the movie on Saturday. Except my little DVD player that works with my laptop had stopped working. Tom tested to make sure it worked in the big TV player, but in order not to cheat him of his TV viewing, I asked for and he picked up a new player. I cried through a lot of the movie, which is fine. I’ve been trying to cry since last summer with little success. I figured I needed it.

When I googled “Tom Robbins” and “Made In Heaven,” besides the movie, my search pulled up a quote from his novel Skinny Legs And All. I took this photo back when Eva was our foster fail because one of her endless nicknames was “Skinny Legs.”

The quote: Some marriages are made in heaven, Ellen Cherry thought. Mine was made in Hong Kong. By the same people who make those little rubber pork chops they sell in the pet department at K Mart.

I’m sure that quote always made me laugh, because our dog Pete LOVED those squeaky plastic pork chop dog toys. Maybe I even have a photo of him with one somewhere.

Tom Robbins’s prose always delivers on many levels.

It’s too late to rewatch Made In Heaven tonight. I’m hoping when I shut down the computer and crawl into bed, I get a full night’s sleep. I need it so much.

Mindful Monday


I got this beautiful image from Mindworks.org. I’m including the link because it’s always good to revisit guidance for improving mindfulness. Some of the words in the image are real challenges for me.

Last night, I was reading my Tom Robbins novel before bed and so much enjoying the euphoria of seeing someone put words together in all the right ways. I checked one of my social media accounts briefly before turning off the lights, commented on a post by someone (who I know only by being a fan of many decades), and my dreams wove crazy stories out of those two reading experiences. They included a song that I’ll now need to play to hear if my brain picked that particular song or its lyrics for my dream soundtrack for a reason.

Anyway, it all made me wake up in a good mood (plus there were two nice dogs snoozing next to me) but then…this…which I probably shouldn’t even post, but it speaks to some of my mindfulness challenges.

Oh, if only ones who told me some of my anxiety triggers would NEVER happen… At least the false idols will be taking good care of themselves.

I’ll be over here gutting deleting that chapter that’s given me so much trouble and trying not to think of real world nightmares for a while. Maybe I can put the words together in all the right ways.