Author: Merrill Lee Girardeau
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That’s my answer too
The Artist’s Way & The War of Art Treating writer’s block is like untangling a really, really long, old rope. As you pull one loop through another, attempting a small liberation, you unwittingly add another knot. This knot and that kink reveal themselves as symptoms of some giant tangle that’s been there decades, and you’re…
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Art and Obedience
Now that 2021 is nearly halfway through, accountability might just become the word of the year. It pops up in all kinds of commentary about policing and the behavior of our elected officials. “There is no ‘healing’ from this without accountability,” tweeted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the days following the Capitol riot. I myself bristle…
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Rhyme and Reason
As an insecure millennial New Yorker, I once attended a rooftop party and wore (if memory serves) a dress shaped like a giant handkerchief and a scrubby sweater the color of burlap. It was a cold evening. There was a fire pit. I was talking with an acquaintance who, upon learning I wrote and studied…
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Prufrock’s Peach
Recently I read a book in which a pastor asks her congregants their #1 most frequent thoughts about themselves. People wrote these thoughts on sticky notes and posted them to a giant board inside the church. Thoughts like, “I am not enough,” and “I won’t be okay until I lose weight.” If we’re honest, as…
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Goofs & Breakthroughs Along The Artist’s Way
If you’re the kind of person who mocks The Artist’s Way—for its weird amount of God talk, its repeated commands to take yourself on dates, how author Julia Cameron recommends you walk around your yard gathering a rock and leaf collection—you should probably stop reading here. I must speak my peace and defend this book,…
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The Notwrite
You are a miracle of avoidance. So you walk. Walk until your hip flexors are leather straps pulling your abdomen taut toward your legs. Your head floats aloft, aware of little but the BQE ocean beneath the Promenade. It’s less like exercise than it means to be, this walk. Wind and sun carry you along.…
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The Bogeyman & Writer’s Block
Today I received an email newsletter entitled, “Are you SCARED to make Art?” (It’s from People I’ve Loved, makers of unique prints, paper goods, blankets, and the like. Check them out!) The body of the email contained really sensitive, genuine content about creative difficulty amidst depression. But I couldn’t shirk the joke of the subject…
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Beyoncé, William Carlos Williams, and Poetic Stamina
The Third Law of Thermodynamics states that Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade must be viewed as well as heard, or American culture as we know it will cease to exist. If you haven’t seen it, well, you’re breaking the law. But those of us in the clear can listen to the sixth season of the Dissect…
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What is it then between us?
There are, they say, endless criteria that make “a New Yorker,” as opposed to someone who just lives here for a spell. Some say it’s three years minimum before you’ve earned the title. Others say five. Six. Ten. Still others say you’re not a New Yorker till you’ve hit a milestone like crying in public.…
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favorite poems of all time: an incomplete obsession
Here’s something: an incomplete list of my favorite poems of all time. Incomplete because I couldn’t remember scads of great poems I’ve read across the years. Still, I was able to compile a pretty good representation of my taste and group poems by theme. (And song lyrics count cause I say so.) Here we go…
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Lawn Mower Death
So I’ve started in with the David Ignatow collection. Friends, this man is obsessed with death and it’s more than his poem about lawn mower death. And I don’t mean the kind that shows up on the nightly news because some teenager tried to ride one into a roman candle war (ask Lancelot about that…
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Tax Psalm
I haven’t been writing my poems, my sonnets, my tax psalms. You know the old saying: might as well blog about it. There are lots of quotes, attributed to many and various writers, about how hard it is not to write when you know you need to. I’ve spent so much time notwriting that…