The Habit of Rainy Nights Press will be releasing The Eye of the Moon as an ebook in late September. An exact date has not been set yet, but it will coincide with a release of the paperback version in Australia. More to come soon.
Monday, July 25th
Sleep past five am eludes me. I sit in the old white wingback watching the sky glow a lighter shade of grey as the moments slip past. Objects in the room take form, stacks of boxes, so many fewer now than yesterday. We worked nonstop on Sunday and my bones feel it, my knees and feet ache.
The loft is finding a shape underneath the burden of our belongings. There is not quite yet a space for the couch coming tomorrow. So glad we didn’t get it last week.
Phone line is not connected yet so we don’t have the net. This is good. Instead of playing stupid games, I’m writing. I need to write so bad and I have the drawing ache again. Sometimes I need to have a pencil in my hand and be sloping across the page, laying down lines as if there were a purpose to it.
On Saturday night with our refrigerator still basically barren, we went urban foraging and found a Chinese restaurant half a block away. Some of the best Chinese food I have had in Portland.
In the courtyard of the Studios, a painter was busy at his easel as the light dimmed from afternoon to evening.
Rain this morning loud enough to hear. I am happy that we will be able to hear it rain. Wind pushes at the leaves of the maple tree. It feels good to be home.
First on the list is our big move. In late July we will be packing up and heading to Milepost 5, an arts community in Portland’s Montavilla neighborhood. Montavilla is our old stomping ground, where Elohi Gadugi/The Habit of Rainy Nights Press was born. We are excited about the move and being in the midst of a creative community of artists, musicians, writers, and poets. We plan to have a big bash in late September or early October, so look for the announcement.
The Habit of Rainy Nights Press is in the process of selecting new offerings for fall and spring. We will be making announcements in a few weeks time, but it looks like we have a couple of very promising manuscripts.
The Germaine Truth is officially in Archive status. There have been no new posts for three years now, but it has been difficult for us to let it go. It is not necessarily dead, and all of the stories can still be accessed as usually, but lacking some new burst of energy, we are on hiatus. It’s been fun!
Other website development is also on hiatus as I put all of my creative energy into finishing my trilogy and doing the best job I can marketing books for our authors.
While I’m at it, thank you to all who have supported our literary endeavors. We hope to have more and better things to come.
Duane
I think we should be mindful with language, to know what we are saying before we speak. Everybody knows that words are more powerful than sticks and stones despite the schoolyard litany to the contrary. Bones mend, and if you think that words cannot kill you, then the lessons of history have been lost on you.
Leaving aside the deadly uses of language, what do we know about the words we use daily without thinking? Words of greeting: Good Morning, How are you, Have a nice day, Bless you.
Greetings and salutations. Hello and to your health. Friendly, with meaning only so far as to say, I’m not going to pull out a knife and kill you actually or metaphorically, and whether or not we mean to be friendly when we make the greeting is not the point. How often are we thinking about how much we would like the stranger or friend we are greeting to have a good morning? How would we know what a good morning would look like to them? How often do we really want to hear a report of someone’s condition when we query, how are you? Have a nice day– nice, not spectacular, nice as if that is the best we can hope for or are willing to confer upon another.
Bless you? Ah, now there’s a greeting, a salutation that carries a lot of baggage. This one is doing more than saying, “I’m not going to kill you”. This one is an identifier. It says, “I’m Christian”. The person offering the greeting may indeed want to confer the blessings of God upon the friend or stranger or they may just want to make a statement about their own identity.
I’m thinking there are very many folk out there bringing down the blessings of God upon their fellow human beings who have not really examined the meaning of the word bless. Lately, I’ve been studying French and reading French news on the net. Lots of these news stories involve, as one would expect, events wherein persons meet with unexpected death or are wounded, injured as a result of some calamity. Tuer, to kill. Mort, death. Blessé, injured. Interesting.
Look up the etymology of that word, bless and you find that it is sanguine. All about blood and sacrifice. To be blessed is to bleed in the cause of something. A word like this is beautifully ambiguous. To be blessed by God could mean to be wounded by contact and that wound could be the sign of your state of grace. Holy wounds. Like the Moravians who became obssessively focused on the wounds of Jesus. Like stigmata.
But over time, as the experience of being human in the English speaking world becomes ever more removed from danger, as death withdraws to a safer distance, we lose contact with the sanguine element of blessing.
To invoke blessing becomes less about the blood of Jesus and the life of the spirit and more about removing obstacles that stand between ourselves and what we want. And also about revealing our own sanctimony. Who stops to consider whether or not the recipient of the invocation has any interest in the blessing? Like a spell being cast, an unsolicited prayer may be perceived as unauthorized interference.
The website of authors Duane Poncy and Patricia J. McLean.