The Spirit Doesn’t Wait for the Staircase

Dianne Sylvan is one of the most thoughtful spiritual writers I’ve read in a long time from any religious tradition, and certainly from the ranks of neopagan voices. It’s hard to believe it’s been two years since she debuted with The Circle Within, and I’m looking forward to doing more than just skim through my recently acquired galley of The Body Sacred, which is all about helping women to love their bodies as incarnations of the divine feminine. On her blog yesterday, Sylvan, who isn’t shy about her curvy figure, told a beautiful story about the perfect comeback to a thoughtless remark of the sort she hears all too often.

I’m not even going to quote from this, because the punchline is so perfect that you need to see the buildup just the way she presented it, with no more preparation than this.

30 August 2005 | uncategorized |

This Will Keep You Busy for a While

The Loggernaut reading series website features six interviews, including a conversation with Daniel Alarcón, whose short story “City of Clowns” includes “one of the most compelling instances in recent literature of a man performing cunnilingus on a woman who is wearing stilts,” at least according to his interviewer.

“In Lima I briefly dated a girl who owned a pair of stilts. I can’t really say much more about it, except to add that I write fiction and have an active imagination.”

The conversations with folks like David Means and Paula Fox are a bit less salacious, by comparison. But just as lengthy–heck, this crew is going to pose a serious West Coast challenge to Robert Birnbaum if they keep at it. Speaking of which, the interviewer so prolific he has to spread his work out on two different web sites chimed in last week with the transcript of a long talk with James Howard Kunstler.

30 August 2005 | interviews |