In “The Speed of Darkness,” Muriel Rukeyser writes, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” On these pages, you will find a few good stories— some about travel, some about accordions, some about people who have come and gone but continue to live inside us somewhere, like a silly old chicken dance or the words to a favorite song. Love, imperfect as it is, does wrap itself around us, keep us warm in a world in which we have sometimes given our hearts away to hepped-up hate and getting and spending and bloviating comb-overs.
Who am I? Mostly a teacher. I’ve had a good time teaching years of English in a community college, my favorite gig being Brit Lit and the Romantic poets. I whack tennis balls a couple times a week. I’ve played accordion in four bands and pick up the old squeeze box whenever I need to make melodic sense of the world. This summer I’ll be back playing in a couple local farmers’ markets. I love watching teensy kids take turns pushing on the bass buttons and learning where the music comes from. And I’ve lived past lives on both coasts–five years in Manhattan and 10 in Seattle.
What about the writing here? I’ve removed the poem, “Black Angel,” published by the New York Quarterly in 1977 and awarded an humanitarian award by that publication because after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis where I live, I’ve realized that the poem includes racist tropes. Soon I will add more poems to that Poem page. The Minneapolis StarTribune ran “The Street-Walker’s Guide to Wealth” on their op-ed page and The Seattle Weekly published, “The portrait of Ralph and Mary,” a story about what happened when two stalwart souls got displaced by the Seattle Art Museum. The Progressive Catholic Voice picked up my modest proposal to pillory gay people in local sanctuaries. And I’ve included for your reading, Chapter 1 from a new novel, An Old Dyke’s Tale, in “Stories New and Old.”
Artwork and photos on this page by Judith Connor