"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty
Dreamt I sat by a river, stacking stones, gray pebbles, that I built into a small curved wall, then dismantled, piece by piece, the stones smooth and slick in my hands.
Rocks act as the memory for our planet. By examining their elemental makeup and physical structure, scientists can understand the history of the earth. The fossil records left in rock formations literally describe our planet’s journey through time. Seen in this light, even the stones and pebbles we find in our backyards are pieces of the ancient past and the secrets of how we came to be in this vast universe.
It’s my oldest son’s birthday today. I never could have know, twenty-eight years ago, that I wasn’t just having a baby: I was meeting one of my best ever friends.
Make art about adult children. Or about best friends.
With my oldest son J, early 1989
9/21/2016
Make art about lighting a candle for someone you Love.
9/22/2016
Been thinking all day about living in other times. I would have made a terrible Victorian woman 🙂
Make art imagining yourself in another time, another era.
Spent a lot of time the last two days in traffic jams.
Make art about something unexpectedly positive arising from being stuck in a traffic jam.
8/25/2016
Make art about ceremony.
8/26/2016
Make art about grandmothers.
8/27/2016
Make art about spirituality or faith as a spectator sport.
8/28/2016
Make art about realizing you already had what you though your were looking for.
8/29/2016
Make art about finding family, or about the family you choose, rather than the one you were born to.
8/30/2016
Mercury goes into a three week retrograde, starting today. Careful with communication and travel plans.
Make art about something spinning backwards, or about a snafu in communication or travel.
8/31/2016
Make art about taking a shortcut.
9/1/2016
Make art about coming back home.
9/2/2016
Make art about a specific request from a child.
9/3/2016
Make art about dragons.
9/4/2016
Interestingly, the word dragon derives from two separate Greek words. One word means “a huge serpent or snake” and the other means “I see clearly”.
Make art about seeing the panoramic view, the big picture.
9/5/2016
Make art about getting your wings.
9/6/2016
Recently witnessed a young man in line at the grocery store pay for the purchases of the stranger behind him, just as an act of kindness.
Make art about an act of kindness toward a stranger.
9/7/2016
In that same grocery store line, the woman behind me, even after having witnessed the young man’s spontaneous act of kindness, ranted on about how awful young ones are.
Make art about being blind to what’s right before you.
9/8/2016
Soundtrack for the day: R.E.M.
Make art about losing your religion.
9/9/2016
Whoever the next man in my life turns out to be, he’s gonna need to love onions 🙂 or at least be tolerant of how much I love em.
Make art about loving someone in spite of themselves 🙂
9/10/2016
I have been diagnosed with Complicated Grief Based PTSD. PTSD is so misunderstood.
Make art about PTSD, about the echoes and scars of trauma.
9/11/2016
The sky was so blue that day.
Make art about the tension of beauty set against tragedy.
9/12/2016
“Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.” (Proverbs 14:10).
Make art about healing bitterness. Or about finding compassion for a bitter person.
9/13/2016
“Where is a woman, there is magic. If there is a moon falling from her mouth, she is a woman who knows her magic, who can share or not share her powers. A woman with a moon falling from her mouth, roses between her legs, and tiaras of Spanish moss, this woman is a consort with the spirits.”~Nzotake Shange. Ms. Shange has inspired me since my teen years. She still does, every day.
Pick a line from a writer who has inspired you for years, and use it to inspire art.
9/14/2016
Make art about the Harvest Moon. Or about an eclipse. Use either as a metaphor in a new and different way.
9/15/2016
Make art about stitches, something sewn together, or something coming apart at the seams.
9/16/2016
Make art about a late night visitor.
9/17/2016
We managed to surprise my oldest son with a birthday celebration today 🙂 Not an easy task to catch him off guard that way 🙂
Make art about surprising someone.
9/18/2016
Came home from my walk to find The Fisher King on TV, one of my favorite movies.
Make art inspired by a scene from a favorite film.
9/19/2016
Writing today about a particularly tough lesson I learned.
Light will be a journey of emotion through photography and poetry. It will feature the work of established and emerging photographers and poets. The theme for the inaugural issue is Human. It’s a bit of a challenge. We identify humanity with countless topics. There are many ways to make the “human-ness” of our situations personal, beautiful, and memorable. But how do we take what’s so familiar and make it fresh and surprising? We’re looking for photography and poetry that investigate the theme. Give us your boldest, slyest, most inquisitive visions of the human.
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.”~Violette Leduc
Make art about relentless heat.
19 August 2016
So I stood in my yard today and watched a truck hauling a trailer lose control just long enough to smash my mailbox to smithereens.19 August 2016
Make art about witnessing destruction.
20 August 2016
Visiting with family and looking through some newly discovered old family photographs, including some I’d never seen of that wild lil girl I was 🙂
Make art about yourself as a child.
21 August 2016
My sons helped me shuck, cut, and can six dozen ears of corn today. It’s a messy job, but now the house smells like caramel corn, and we have yummy summer in a jar for those cold winter months.
Make art about a task that’s hard, but worth it.
22 August 2016
I’m headed out later this week for a spiritual retreat and a couple of road trip visits with family. Excited, but fretting over getting all my stuff ready.
Headed off to wild and wonderful West Virginia for a reading. Driving through these amazing Appalachian mountains always fills me with such awe.
Make art about the mysteries felt in mountains.
14 August 2016
Road Angel named Bay, a very large beautiful young man working as a cashier in a roadside stop, his smile like a bright bright beacon, caught me doing a lil dance in the aisle to the BeeGees piping in overhead. He grinned and immediately started dancing too 😀So we finished out Stayin Alive while I paid 🙂
Make art about dancing with strangers. 🙂
15 August 2016
Feeling this this morning, the music.
“Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song/in my own breath”~Philip Levine
Make art about the music you hear, in anything, in everything.
Spent all day canning and preserving food. Always takes me back into the company of all those over time who did this before me, especially the women who taught me, as a child, to can and put up food for the winter.
Make art about food as heritage.
12 August 2016
Was abruptly awakened by a crow at the window, informing me—loudly–that the suet cages needed filling 🙂
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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