Dynamic Woman — Changing Times
Writers asked to do novel excerpts on Christmas themes might assume readers expect perfect Christmas scenes with the family gathered around the tree celebrating the joy of Christ’s birth. But this Hallmark Christmas moment is not what many families experience.
A girl goes to see her dentist and he takes x-rays with his fancy new imaging device that has amazing detection powers. Lo and behold, it detects a shadow that indicates something is possibly embedded in her jaw—a cyst perhaps—that could rearrange her teeth, fracture her jaw, or worse. Or not. Rare, but it happens.
On a classic movie channel this week, co-host and incomparably beautiful actress Madeleine Stowe gave her response to a screening of Splendor in the Grass. She commented that back in the day, people and landscape were inexorably woven together.
John Updike captured the stubborn futility of hanging onto our stuff in his short story, “The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe”—he calls it “thrift’s absurd inertia.”
The value we attach to an experience often comes from the first person who shared the experience with us.
Like fiber artists, writers are people who like to pull disparate material together; solitary strands, swatches, and twists take on new meaning when woven, pieced, or braided together for a purpose. In fiber art, that purpose might be to clothe, decorate, or inspire. In story, writers work with words and images to endless purpose—to entertain, inform, shock, arouse…it’s a long list.
