Difficult Degrees

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Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it–don’t cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist–but don’t think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you

The world breaks everyone, and afterward,

some are strong at the broken places.

~Papa Hemingway

 

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“–Give yourself permission to write badly at first; all first drafts are shit–just write.”

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This writing blog has come quite a ways–from a confession of sorts in a hard time to creative writing, publications here and there, story sharing, and a sort of off the path place for me to share my shit without pressure.

The past year-and if you’re a current reader you’ve witnessed this-has been an explosive period of awakening as a writer and as a woman. Opening. To the ugly and beautiful, the fucked up and serene. I am changing, and changing and changing. Late blooming–coming into my own, huh, Mosk?

More to come here, but this is just a quick update.

Also, I have scrapped the old memoir, because it was a bullshit attempt at writing for an audience instead of myself, and real people brave enough to get dirty. New stuff is coming outta the woodwork, and only a little is on here, as I am varnishing for publication.

~Amy Jo

March 2018

  

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Shane Koyzcan:

Look directly into every mirror. Realize our reflection is the first sentence to a story, and our story starts: WE WERE HERE.

 

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Essays and poems have appeared in some places like Adanna Literary Journal Fall 2017,  Word Riot July 2016 creative nonfiction piece; Frigg Magazine ISSUE 35, Frigg Issue 44, Adanna Literary Journal Fall 2017, Third Wednesday, Psychic Meatloaf, Rose and Thorn Poetry Journal, The Writing Disorder and anthology, Haggard & Halloo, The Longridge Review, Aqueous Magazine, Blood and Thunder: Medical Musings, DMU’s “The Abaton,” The Woven Tale Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Two Drops of Ink and a few more.

 

I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard – and in order to forget. 

Henry Miller

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