11 – 17 August 2024 QOTW
Image description: a glass with red dye making a pattern on a table. Photo by Charles Earl.
11 – 17 August 2024
Sunday
‘Spare me the drudgery of systematic examinations, and give me the lightning flashes of those wild books in which there is no attempt to cover the ground thoroughly or reasonably.’
Geoff Dyer as quoted by @KatherineMay in The Clearing, Ten quotes that help me to think about writing
Monday
We wanted to make something interactive and engaging. We wanted people to see the sites. We wanted people to feel connected to the city.
– Jean-Marie Guerrier, vice president of Black History Ottawa, on the new History in the Streets Bus Tour which highlights sites in the National Capital Region where Black Canadians have left their mark. The tour operates every Saturday until October. (Audrey Gunn in Capital Current) (History in the Streets Bus Tour) as quoted in the Ottawan Newsletter
Tuesday
Experimental writing is writing that makes us learn to read again, writing that is exhausting because it does not rely on habits, because it aims to break habits to make us hear what we could not hear, beautiful because we can feel what we are achieving by reading.
Jérôme Melançon : Notes and Theses on Zong! by M. NourbeSe Phillp in Periodicities.
Wednesday
Joy doesn't always come spontaneously. Much like wonder, you have to make space for it in your life
Helen De Cruz, Finding Joy from the Substack Newsletter Wondering Freely,
Thursday
I am running way off topic here and getting myself into quite a tangle.
Jane Burn, the University of the Self, #26
Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Never the Same Place Twice (Part 1).
I love the idea of getting oneself into a tangle, a form of rabbit hole. My ambition this week is to get into a tangle. The rest of this post and part 2 are both fascinating and thoughtful essays on Jane’s continued investigation into place.
Friday
I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.
from “Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl” by Dorianne Laux as quoted by Jeannine Ouellette in “When They Fight & When They Sing
A structured writing exercise for opening into mystery + the art of juxtaposing one thing and another thing in order to see (or sense) what emerges in the space between” in her amazing Substack, Writing in the Dark.
Saturday
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shihab Nye as quoted by Laurie Easter in Kindness and Sorrow in Brevity Magazine, writing about her grief after the death of her husband and how people were with her, and seen by me from Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark Substack.
If you have inspiring and intriguing quotes to share, please reach out. I’d love to include them here.
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