Lisa Gale Garrigues's Blog
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Nov.14.2010
When I was a kid I used to sit around all day and draw pictures. Artistically, they were passable, but my purpose was not to make art but to make stories. I would draw the characters, and some of the scenes--and then later, fill in the words. Or not. As a result, I still have newsprint stapled...
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Sep.18.2010
Okay, I’m back to being a writer now, after taking several months off to do other things. Here are some of the things I did: Created a beautiful jungle garden in my backyard, which now has mint, basil, sunflowers, impatiens, primroses, petunias, ferns, sparrows, morning doves,...
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Aug.27.2010
What happens to those hard-earned short stories that you were so proud to finally get published in a magazine?Do they gather mold in your bottom drawer along with the certificate of recognition you got when you won the sixth grade spelling bee? Do you fiercely collect them in a binder to prove to...
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Apr.03.2010
I am taking a vacation from being a writer.
For a long time this has been a huge part of my identity. Even when I wasn't writing, I was 'a writer', with articles/stories or poems percolating in my brain, along with certain expectations that I had of myself for completing them.
Making a living at...
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Oct.04.2009
Like everybody else, I recently got a couple of emails from Red Room requesting money. I don't have a problem with that. I know that venture capital is harder to come by these days and websites have got to pay their staff somehow. So I will probably give them something, as a token of my...
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Sep.29.2009
I was going to launch into a blog- whine about The Incredible Shrinking Word, which was going to be my clever way of bemoaning the death of print journalism, and the fact that one of my editors just sliced my paychecks for freelance articles by a third.
Instead I will link to this advice to a...
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Sep.27.2009
Several people have asked me what that thing is on my shoulder in my profile photo. So I will now let the secret out: it's a monkey. The monkey and I were in the backyard of a tiny café in a Peruvian jungle town called Salvacion, where I was on an investigative assignment for the newspaper Indian...
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Sep.25.2009
Susan Atkins, ex-Charles Manson follower and convicted murderer of Sharon Tate, died today. Her death brought me back to when I was fifteen years old and staring across the room at Charles Manson.
The room was a courtroom in Los Angeles, crowded with spectators who had stood in line for hours...
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Aug.05.2009
I am obsessed with
getting it right. By this I mean I am obsessed with the unavoidable knowledge that I will only live this one life this one time, even if I allow for reincarnation and the possibility that I'll come back as a three-toed sloth. So I want to be as human as I can be this time...
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Jul.29.2009
While I was following the Obama-Gates-Crowley controversy in the last few days, another police-related controversy was unfolding in a small California town near where I was visiting family. Both incidents had this in common: "yomama."
"Yomama" is "your mama" said...
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Jul.22.2009
I have just discovered that my other blog when turned into Spanish is all about Lisa and her Windy Little Oak Plantation.
At least, that’s how the internet translator Babelfish interpreted my name, since Gale is a windstorm and Garrigues is a region of scrub oaks along the border of France and...
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Jul.21.2009
Five A.M. Outside my window, the silhouette of the mountain going from black to brown, the night's deep blue lightening to pale. I begin to make out shapes in the earth: sage, pine, stones. The birds fill the air with their bird syllables, preparing for their day. What are they doing? Making...
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Jul.15.2009
Completion.
This is one of my horror-words, a word that sits up in the corner, folds its arms beneath its long stern face,and taps its legs impatiently on the floor to the tune of some song that I, no matter how hard I try, am never going to learn. Then, suddenly,when it is tired of tapping, it...
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Jul.09.2009
To mend.
1. "to free from sin or fault, improve morally," 2. "to fix something torn or broken" 3."to regain health"
When I let this word sink into my bones what surfaces is the Kabbalistic concept of "Tikkun Olam", which says that when the world was created...
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Jul.07.2009
Now here's a delectable word, one of those words that are crisscrossed and bundled up with meaning: spell.
Hmm. Wonder what would happen if I opened the door and invited all of those meanings to come and sit inside my story? Perhaps something like this:
My Auntie Elaine, having suffered a...
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About Lisa Gale
Lisa Gale Garrigues was born in Los Angeles and has lived in Spain, France, Switzerland, England, Peru and Argentina, working as a teacher, writer, translator and private investigator. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in Writer's Digest,...
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