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.”

Photo Friday, No. 946

Current Photo Friday theme: Edges.


Mendocino, California, 1998, shot on film

Three Voices At The Edge

In Mendocino’s morning mist
Where time collides with memory
Voices sing from hissing surf
Muse: We live on the edge of a body of water
Maiden rewrites her lyric:
He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone.
But at his head no grass-green turf,
At his heels no stone.

Maestro: How deep is the ocean
How deep is the ocean
I’ve lost my way

© Becky Cochrane, 2025

Sunday Sundries

Things that inspire me.


Clockwise from bottom left: Crystal “create” stone from Timmy. Other stones: carnelian, the creative powerhouse; citrine, the light of inspiration; quartz crystal seer stone egg. Essential oils; pictured here: lavender. Stars and candlelight. Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words: Simple Poetry Prompts That Unlock The Creativity in Everyone. Electric and acoustic guitars at 1:6 scale and an enamel pin showing a drum kit to represent music and musicians. Fine art, represented by postcard books with selected Mark Rothko paintings and selections from The Art of Florence.

I chose to take a poetry prompt from Fasano’s book about a new year.

Here’s how I wrote the poem.

New Year Poem: A Visitor
While everyone is counting in the year,
their hands full of confetti,
their eyes full of clocks,
I will do it differently:
I will walk out purposefully through the noise
and sit alone beneath the trees
and wait for you, muse.
Quietly, quietly, I will wait.
And if you come, if you speak,
if you reveal your wish,
I will hear.
I will be there.

©Becky Cochrane, January 2025


Happy New Year confetti from Geri (part of what inspired me).

The Muse and The Time Traveler

I pulled out all the tiles from my Magnetic Poetry® Wood Words box. From the moment I began to assemble my poem from among them, I knew exactly who and what inspired it. When I placed a specific word, I also knew what photo from my archives I hoped to find to share with the finished poem.


From September 2009, based on a challenge from television’s “Project Runway” for my website’s “Runway Monday” series, I found her. She’s in fashion I designed for her of silk, satin, polyester, tulle, and crepe. A sheer coincidence only a handful of people will understand: I’d named this doll Maggie and said she was dressed as a Time Traveler. I’m grateful to my Muse and this Mattel Model Muse doll. I hope she likes the role she plays. There’s no role I’d rather have in my world than writer.

Here’s her poem, destined to be named “Time Traveler.”

©Becky Cochrane, 2025

Today is the anniversary of the date Riley died in 2008. The L.A. fires and their consequences have kept me emotional for the last week already, so this year, Riley’s loss feels a little sharper. The other night, Tom and I watched The Last Waltz, which I haven’t seen probably since the late seventies, when it was released. I still remembered the songs, the performers (band members and musical guests), and some of the conversations with members of The Band as they talked about how the concert (the focus of the film, as directed by Martin Scorsese) was bringing to an end their sixteen years of performing on the road.

Though most of the members worked together again, they never again performed live as a group with Robertson. Now all are gone, except for keyboardist Garth Hudson, who’s 87 and has been reported as a resident in an assisted living facility since 2022, when his wife Maud died. ETA: Garth Hudson died on January 21, five days after this post.

  • Richard ManuelDied in 1986 at the age of 42 
  • Rick DankoDied in 1999 at the age of 55 
  • Levon HelmDied in 2012 at the age of 71 
  • Robbie RobertsonDied in 2023 at the age of 80

I think the footage of The Band singing with Bob Dylan got to me the most, maybe because Riley loved him so much and considered him a songwriting muse. I had a lump in my throat listening to “Forever Young” and “I Shall Be Released.” So many memories. In an alternate life, Riley and I might have ended up in L.A., friends sharing a house in a neighborhood like Altadena, while I pursued all the things that would have informed my fiction and he played everywhere anyone wanted to hear a guitarist, pianist, and songwriter. I’m not sure either of us ever wanted fame and fortune as much as the chance to create and be true to ourselves. Riley did play all over the Southeast (I’m not sure about his time in Nevada), and he wrote a lot of songs. I never lived further west than Texas, but I’ve had fiction published, and what I’m working on now includes real settings (many of them decimated by the fires) and celebrates my fictional artists (none of them native-born Angelenos) of Los Angeles.

I’m so grateful for the years of friendship Riley and I shared. Though we aren’t the Muse and Time Traveler of the poem, Riley’s part of why they exist.

Sunday Sundries

This week’s theme: Things that are black or black and white.

A pyramid with hieroglyphics; a raven on a skull, evoking Poe; a crow and a raven on either side of a cranberry/amaretto candle (gift of Debby–a nice scent to create to), atop two of my favorite books, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’; coffee mug with ‘LOVE’ that includes a paw print; quartz crystal ball with black tourmaline inclusions; and the ‘300 MORE Writing Prompts’ book.

Taking a prompt from the book, here’s what I wrote this morning.

Shake it up

My last snow-themed post of the week came from this coloring book and officially brings Christmas week to a close. Christmas itself hasn’t been stressful, which isn’t always the case. I managed to get everything done even though I left most of it until December. NOT Christmas things have been more stressful, but that’s just part of life. All the friends and family we communicated with in one format or another help keep things happy. We have so many and so much to be grateful for.

I hope this guy gives you a smile and serves as a reminder that shaking things up can sometimes be a good thing, and regardless, they settle down in time. I don’t know why his tree looks yellow. It’s green on the page.

ETA: I had a couple of fruit stickers I wanted to add to the page of fruit stickers in Wreck This Journal, and after I did that, I began flipping through the pages until I came to the one for “Rubbings.” It had a single entry on it (“Cowboy”), and I thought of my leather bracelet sitting just across the room on my bookshelf. So I did a rubbing of that, which seems right on this date.

You write it

From this coloring book, back in April and May of 2021, I colored this page (using a photo of a particular surfer for my color choices):

Blue Sky Boy recently suggested “seaside/surfing” as a theme, so here’s another page I just colored from that book.

I didn’t write any flash fiction about it. I did find a prompt in the Write The Poem book, if you’d like to write poetry or prose using the coloring page as your subject. You can share it in comments or keep it only for yourself. In addition to the words the book provided, I’m adding: sailboats, camera, rocky coast, beach plums, and inlets. Enjoy a burst of creativity!

Today’s offering

Off and on since early this morning, I’ve been putting together a post that was intended to be fun with photos and commentary. Then I read an article in which hate, once again, will be affirmed and rejoiced over by those who hate.

Everybody who tells me that NO, THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN, please stop. It’s been happening, is still happening, and will get worse. You can close your eyes and ears and mind, but you can never gaslight me into believing I don’t see and hear and recognize the cold, hard evidence presented every day.

So I don’t feel like being funny. I will take a moment to recognize that my forever Muse would be eighty were he still alive today. In his honor, I’ll go back to the world sprung from my imagination, where hate will never win.

Tiny Tuesday!


Barbie and friends do a reenactment of me preparing to find fashion, dress skeletons, and post photos to social media (i.e., my Instagram account), with Lord Cuttlebone and his nephew Ambrose supervising (i.e., chattering unsolicited advice into my ear). Since the theme is set: a spooky season homage to music, WILL I HAVE ENOUGH T-shirts or band memorabilia to do the entire month of October? The Shadow knows…

I’ve put my first seven days of photos behind the cut, if you want to see the artists I’ve featured.

Continue reading “Tiny Tuesday!”

Complete! and sort of Circular


As noted previously, during the Beryl power outage, I began rereading romantic suspense novels by Mary Stewart that I’ve been reading since the dawn of time when I was a teenager. After I finished the lot of them, I wondered how many I might be missing, so I looked up her complete list of works. There are the King Arthur books I’ve never read, and some children’s books, but turns out I actually own all of her romantic suspense novels. I shared photos of all the covers in previous posts, up to these two. Even though I’d reread both since 2020, I read them again.


They have two of my favorite male characters, and many of their qualities inspired male characters I’ve written (humor, sensitivity, kindness, strength, intelligence).

I did find in my search a novella and a short story that were published under the guidance of Mary Stewart’s niece, Jennifer Ogden. I’d read neither of these and ordered this edition immediately, which I’ve finished reading today (after an eye exam and a long nap so my eyes could return to their undilated state).

The Wind Off the Small Isles and “The Lost One.” In The Wind Off the Small Isles, Stewart included an Easter egg via a reference to a character in her novel This Rough Magic, an actor named Sir Julian Gale. There’s also an excerpt from that novel at the end of the collection.

This Rough Magic ranks in my top-favorite Stewart novels because it draws from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in its plot. Thanks to the play and Stewart’s novel, my interest was piqued by the 1982 film Tempest. Like Mary Stewart’s novel, the film borrows a lot from Shakespeare’s play. The film is unseen by most people I know–unless I’ve made them watch it with me. (Of course, I own the DVD–do you know me?) Tim and Jim still quote from it.

Tempest was directed by Paul Mazursky and stars the late John Cassavetes (who has long served as a physical model, along with a few of his qualities as a film director/producer of independent films, for one of my secondary characters in the Neverending Saga); Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands; and introducing the young Sam Robards (son of Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall) and future brat-packer Molly Ringwald. This was also the film in which I was introduced to the brilliant actor Raul Julia.

My Muses and inspirations can be found among many people, novels, films, music, and art.

ETA: Beautiful Gena Rowlands died on August 14, age 94. I will think of her reunited with her husband, the two of them making beautifully crafted films together for always. Thank you, John and Gena, for being muses to me.