notepad

22. American writer seeks words in Ireland. Playing with drafts of unrevised words in this space.

[towritemore]

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.

Charles Bukowski

[yeahwrite]

Jobs for Writers on pw.org

PW has a good job listing page just for writers. It’s interesting to browse through whether you’re actively looking for a job, or just want to see what sorts of jobs writers can have!

We also a post did a post a while ago where former English majors wrote in and told us what there jobs are now. You can read that here or on our Writing Advice page under “Education and Careers”.

[towritemore]

A new home

So as soon as I arrived to my new desperate city, I made a 3 euro purchase of one small candle and one blue mug of my own to stretch within this new shell.

[towritemore]

There and back again

On leaving Maynooth, 3 years and 2 years later:

I left that town swearing I owned it.

[ottluuk]

cooking, Hobulaid, 2014

[towritemore]

Pubs and towns have ceilings

And then I looked up to the ceiling of the Roost (bar) and saw it for the first time, and even though below it was love and music and drink and what seemed like my life, the dream was still under a beamed ceiling. There was still a roof. Upon seeing it I was immediately pulled out of it and could not see the life within the same again.

[towritemore]

Empty houses, seashells

On walking past his Irish house for the first time in two years:

this feels like sacred ground, I pull out my headphones and the neighborhood seems quieter, but it looks like just a house. It didn't recognize me, nor I hardly it, walking by. The sidewalks knew me better.

I remember being on the beach that first summer after and hoping with everything that a seashell flung into the waves would throw that house away, too, would move me on. Shells have a way of washing back on shore.

[towritemore]

Oh God, Maynooth, my exhale.

[towritemore]

Cork City

In the mornings, if the fog is especially heavy, I can smell the ocean. At night, the whole town smells like burning peat.

[towritemore]

Daydream

I remember a brief time when I didn't have to daydream.

When I didn't fall so quickly asleep by counting "please's" instead of sheep. I can't tell if my day dreams allow some needed rest and thought, or if they simply sand at my external self until my exposed jaw bone may be seen, dreamily clenched in an immobile, dead smile.

[towritemore]

Bathtub

I became so comfortable - or desensitized - after that first thrill of running bath water scouring parts of skin I had never thought could flush

That I didn't notice the tub draining until I was left naked, airing in an empty basin, knees shivering against my chest, as red burns continued to stripe across my cold-blooded skin.

[towritemore]

Spotlight shadows

Where I knew shadows so intimately, so privately, she dragged her heavy spotlight after her there, too. It was hard for someone like me to believe in her shadows when she spilt a neon spotlight above her head. The only shadows I could make out were those cast by herself, on her face.

[towritemore]

Magnolia years

The way she walks through this place to show all others that they are a bother here, she tells them with her pace that she is closer than they are to this campus, that she has earned an intimacy that they can never know, the knowing of a place by 4 am walks and wine tears and sobering letters and friendships that look like magnolias, watered under that tree there, and there, and under that tree, too, and all of them, and the glossy leaves themselves whisper old insights as the ground rises to her feet to confirm the truth of their private knowing. She never doubted yeast was alive.

[towritemore]

moon shadows

Our moon shadows cast

like your artery and my vein

along the severed sidewalk

only growing as we lapped around the grassed field.

  When I walk there in the daylight

I can still feel those bulging shadows

pulse even when I press along them,

damming their source

beneath my thumb, my heavy heels,

they somehow manage to feed on.

[towritemore]

Walking alone at night

When walking alone at night, I don't look at what I can see. I look into the shadows, the brush, the dark, darker, patches, vigil into what I can't see.

[towritemore]

Hemingway

"By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better."

Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

[towritemore]

Paper girl

She was curled in bed, her face hidden but her hair like cursive on her pillow. Yellow letters sheeted her duvet, the floor, the bedside table...

Her little room had become the expanse of a book, and she another page in it.

(Let me be your scent; I want you to smell like me.)