NoraSawyer.com

Very suddenly, about a month and a half ago, Brian and I decided to buy a boat.
So, buy a boat we did, and so we spent November getting rid of things. Bags and bags of clothes to goodwill, 24 boxes of books to the Friends of the San Francisco public library.

So now we live on [...]

My first week of yoga, I was feeling very virtuous. Beer? Nah, I’m trying to stay hydrated. Up early for yoga class? Nothing I’d rather do. The only problem is, I spent the last three years living pretty indolently, exercising only incidentally (the hills on the walk to and from work, sitting up to grab [...]

I picked up a secondhand paperback of Robert Frost’s poems just before Christmas, and I’ve been keeping it in my pocketbook for times when I need a little glimpse of muddy shoes or old stone walls. Anyway, I’d never read this one before, and am trying now to commit it to memory:
For Once, Then, Something
, [...]

Tonight, I got the urge to draw, so I pulled an old notebook out of a drawer. After I’d doodled for a bit (walruses and trees and frogs and bullrushes), I started flipping through its pages. On one, I’d written (and this is transcribed verbatim),
The bedroom window; the tree; rain & puddles; sinister underneath; woods; [...]

1. Brian’s moved into a new studio space down in Bayview, what my friend Dustin calls the Last Lonely Place in San Francisco. This morning as I was riding the T-line out to visit, I kept seeing ghost children. A large blue sign was a small boy in a blue winter coat. A man walking [...]

I recently engaged in a deep cleaning of my childhood bedroom. This was, without a doubt, long overdue – I haven’t lived at home for more almost ten years, and I only squeak in under the decade mark due to an ill-advised semester off from college. But I come from a family of savers, and [...]

I am a card-carrying member of Facebook nation (or would be, if Facebook nation carried anything so solid-state as membership cards). I blog. I tweet. I have friends who I have never met – and never plan to meet – in person, and ones who I’ve come to know better online than I ever did [...]

Over at Mightygirl, Maggie Mason has been posting a weekly mixtape of new songs she’s been enjoying. Here’s my take on it, looking at some old favorites:
Joni Mitchell: Overture/Cotton Avenue, from Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter

Lots of girls go through a Joni Mitchell phase. In my case, it was less with the folksy “I’ve looked at [...]

It’s the last week of the semester. So, while I attempt to write two papers in as many days, finish my portfolio, and somehow get ready to go camping this weekend (seriously: what was I thinking?), here’s a poem I like by Dennis Lee, from Nicholas Knock and Other Poems (illustrated by Frank Newfeld, published [...]