Confessions of a Failed Blogger

I hate the last thing I put up, worry I sound oblique or coy and that wasn’t what I meant at all, at all. And hate that the hating of it draws attention to it, that to take it down would make it look like more than it was. Yesterday I had a morning when every word I wrote seemed to come springing gleefully from my fingertips. This morning the words are leaden and have to be squeezed out painfully, and I am angry. I sort papers in my office, read from the book I found on Amazon that seems to be about exactly what I meant to write about, has a title much like my own beloved title, only it’s BETTER, so much better. I scoop up the printed up copies of poems written by the one friend with whom I would like to discuss this, the friend whose absence leaves a...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 30, 2010 | 2 comments

Love Harder

The mantra at violin lessons this week was “simple, not easy.” Which, you know, always. It is a week, apparently, for sorting through priorities and commitments and experiencing dramas that are not my own to write about, and of course I have realizations about how I am living, about what I want from life, and they sound so simplistic as to be completely trite and banal. Which, I know if I get it right, it’s going to be simple, not easy. I take a risk of being all publicly trite/banal as well as the risk of being offensively vague about the nature of the week’s drama, because I need this as a place to lodge reminders to myself, a place where I can set down ideas for when I need return to them. The big one right now, though, is that in order...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 24, 2010 | 0 comments

Interiority

I remember this now. The long hours of sitting and listening to, mostly, what’s just inside my own head. The attention to how my head works, the finding words for experience, the obsessive collection of phrases and fragments and thoughts threading. I think it’s a luxury, on the one hand, but, on the other hand, it messes me up out there; I find myself studying everyone around me looking for evidence that our interiority all has congruencies, that if my interiority and hers, his, are not identical that they at least share certain landmarks, I am shocked at what seems like dullness or just general obliviousness, unwilling to believe that that is really it, in dread of my tendency to slip towards self-satisfaction or smugness or anything resembling...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 17, 2010 | 3 comments

Head Up For a Moment

It’s one of those memories with dream-like clarity so I hardly trust it, it might be a composite, the site where my father is working on a house for someone with enough money to buy land where there are no close neighbors. We would go to where he was working I think bringing him a meal, a picnic, like Little House on the Prairie, or maybe he would take us when the work day was over, show my mother so she could picture where he was spending his days, the construction site safer for his little girls when they wouldn’t be in the way of wheelbarrows of adobe bricks and the hoisting of vigas. More, I remember the joy of clambering up stacked lumber, playing king of the hill on enormous piles of dirt, scrounging for the trimmed ends of electrical wire that...

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Posted by Mara Collins on Sep 9, 2010 | 0 comments