Writing Spaces: Spring Work

 

“Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.”
― John Muir

image:  Christie Cochrell, Filoli

 

Writing Spaces

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Liber Floridus, Leviathan

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Edward Gorey, The Interesting List

Torre del Lago

 

Another memorial sketch of mine, “Torre del Lago (A Triptych),” bits of creative nonfiction often reworked over the years, has been published in the Spring 2025 issue of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose—a print edition which can be ordered from the publisher.

 

The triptych includes Lucca, Italy; Santa Fe, New Mexico/Nagasaki, Japan; and Hawaii's Kona and Kohala Coasts.  (Unlikely—but then so has been my life!)  All of the threads of this are tied together by Giacomo Puccini the composer, and his transportative music (especially Madama Butterfly.

 

It begins (though not where it really began)

"One late October afternoon, some twenty years after my father’s death, we take the train from Lucca to Torre del Lago.  Arriving finally at the station on the lake where Giacomo Puccini's villa stands, where he wrote the music that has been for me since childhood the touchstone of beauty and sorrow.  The villa where, I wrote some twenty years ago, they found eight phonograph records with labels in Japanese."

 

And ends (much earlier) with yellow fishes in the blue-black water of the Kona Coast—after a long, time-traveling  journey in between.

 

Images:  Villa Museo Puccini

Yellow Tang

 

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Franklin Booth, Giving Wings to Words

Writing Spaces

 

image:  Christie Cochrell, The Globe Theatre, 2010