Edith Hope Bishop

Hello friends! Had the pleasure of a short retreat this past weekend to Port Townsend, WA with the Lindle sisters. If you haven't been to PT before, I highly recommend it for writerly and artistic inspiration. The sweeping seascapes are plenty enough reason to visit, but the lively town is also full of interesting characters and happenings. For example, I spent a fair amount of time at this coffee shop counter writing and watching the sailboats go by... ...and was then interrupted by the arrival of a robot and several teenage engineers.        They were prepping their contraptions for the Rhododendron Festival Parade and I even got to sneak a peek at their lab, located in a loft above the coffee shop.  Since I'm currently fiddling with a MG sci-fi project, I was delighted by this encounter. Though, truth be told, it was a bit hard to focus with this going on in town: and this: and this: (Please note the random Outlander in the background

I met a man once who was reading Virginia Woolf in a café. He wore a bowtie and a hat. Except it wasn’t Virginia Woolf, it was a biography by her nephew, Quentin Bell. He said it was better than other records of her life, really, that he’d read so many. I asked, was he a scholar of Virginia Woolf. Not really, he said, I’m just taken with her life. Not her works, really, which was odd, he guessed, just her person. She’s inspired so much interest, he said, like Proust. He couldn't say he'd ever finished one of her novels, but he’d read all of her diaries, her journals and letters, multiple accounts of her life, criticism good and bad. Oh, I said, I love her work but I guess I’m a bit nervous to study her life. I know about her illness and her demise, so I worry. Her work is incredibly inspiring to me. I’m a huge fan. I encourage you, he said, to learn about her life. Though I should warn you, it’s troubling the way that people try to co-opt her, to make her into something they wa

These guys are infesting Seattle right now, but they sure are cute. They spend weeks munching away, molting, and building (rather unsightly) communal cobweb tents for shelter. When they're good and fed, they spin a cocoon, turn into fuzzy brown moths, and live for just a couple more days, long enough to mate and lay eggs. Sometimes, as a writer, I'm impatient to be a butterfly (read: be published and please readers). These guys are a good reminder that sometimes caterpillar life is where it's at. Friends, wishing you a happy day!