As a father, I know that there is at least one good thing I have done for our four children, and that was teaching them, by daily example, the value and fun of wordplay. And to this day, now in their thirties and forties, their conversation is vital and alive with puns and ridiculous combinations of words and meanings. They can read something like Letters and Figs without missing a […]
Writing about dreams is much more difficult than writing the dreams themselves. On the other hand, writing is a dream, and being able to write is possibly the greatest dream of all. So perhaps it’s best to look at it from this vantage point: parts of the dream are written, while other parts, though not written, influence the written parts so much that they read like highway signs on my […]
A child’s doll has died — such an innocent, heartbreaking image, easy to accept within the context of a dream, as is the doll’s resurrection. While it’s faithfully recorded from my own experience, the passage reads like fiction; perhaps that is why, if a child in the neighborhood told me her doll had died, I would believe her, and offer whatever sympathy and help she needed, even if that help […]
It’s hard to know who’s crazy here — the subject, the poet, or the reader. Likely all three; because we all hunger for beauty, and are able to find it in unique places, and experience it and share it in unique ways. Whether this is also a definition of wisdom, is for each of us to decide. We’ll be wrong either way. That, too, is our gift. In my own […]
What they suffered, they suffered together. Material wealth was never their concern, their poverty being the inherited kind. Yet kindness is their inheritance. It’s been said that they died the same day, within hours of each other, their shared dream having run its course. There were children, one of whom, we are told, made these sketches of her parents when they were both very old, using a piece of charcoal […]
This thoughtful little canvas hangs on the wall near our old oak dining table. It’s been there for years, and I still study it often, half-expecting a change in expression. Someday, if it isn’t discarded, or ruined by water or fire, it will belong to someone — valued, perhaps, or politely kept in a drawer. In that way, its story might be seen as similar to our own. And so […]
Upon returning to the short piece Dream Baby, I am pleased to see how recounting a simple dream, which was pleasant enough itself, leads to a passage of memory, which then transforms itself into a kind of poetic, universal love story. While I am the hairy old uncle and grandfather, I also embody the uncles and grandfather of my childhood, their whiskery familiarity and smell. In a sense, the dream […]
If this is my calling, so be it. If it’s simply something I like or love to do, again, so be it. And yet, at the beginning of my Perspective statement, which was written a dozen or so years later, and has remained unchanged to this day, I say, Each word I write and line I draw is an artist’s statement — not because I am an artist, but because […]
and this is the world in the form of a map mountains are knuckles and nations are blotches of failed pigment and this is my skin and that is where rivers run * I really do forget the drawings, and the poems. I call this a blessing — to be surprised, upon finding them later, and to feel almost as if they were done by someone else, as, in a […]
I love this drawing, and its gentle simplicity. But I love what I said about drawing every bit as much, because it’s such an apt description of how I feel about art. The figure itself took a lifetime and about two minutes to make; or, to put it another way, it all happened in a breath. ~ [ 1980 ]
William Michaelian 