deanna hershiser

The style of the essayist is that of an extremely intelligent, highly commonsensical person talking, without stammer and with impressive coherence, to him- or herself, and to anyone else who cares to eavesdrop.
~Joseph Epstein~

Things come.
Not as expected, or even as the shadow of expectation sometimes, but they arrive. Sailing in: the phrase I thought couldn’t be grasped, the way to shape a structure, the whereabouts of that envelope surely lost.
They show up when it’s important.
If not, well, they still might.

I want to uncover from real to real,
though I can barely get beyond imagined.
The role my supposings play, though, makes it fun:
a biography of air, of ants, or aunts,
a piece of driftwood once a tree.
A foundation crumbles,
a cemetery stone speaks.
My face in the mirror
draws down.
I wander long hours, imagining
why this was, or what [...]

My blog’s date is in the military (and faraway places) style, with the day preceding the month. I’ve tried to make it regular American, to no avail. But as Tim says, I should prefer it; it’s logical that way.
Tim was in the Navy long ago, when we were first married. I’ve written another online-accepted piece, [...]

It’s not so much sitting down, composed,
saying, “What shall I write today?”
as it is racing, capturing
ideas
that surge, foaming, onto shore,
before they pull away.

For a few years I tried to write prettier – to add flourishes that would astound. I guess I didn’t think I would run into that purple prose problem, because I had tended at first to write so sparsely.
Surely, I thought, I could only strengthen my prose by gazing often into gilded, trickled springs or [...]

This week, you may have noticed, I posted five times.
Last weekend I decided to try writing things ahead and then utilizing the blog’s “schedule post” feature so they would magically appear, as if predestined.
This has been a trial run but not a trial. I’ve kinda liked it. Schedules in my world are always for flexing, [...]

Writing is waiting
and problem solving
and waiting and
starting over
and giving up and changing your
mind and reading
sentences until they drip from your ears
and redoing them again.

An old friend came down from our attic.
It tugged my memories. The gray, dignified look, the smell of ink ribbon, the sound made by a key’s strike. At once I was back in my bedroom during the summer after sixth grade, when Mom finally allowed us kids to practice writing and create whatever we wanted [...]

…for something completely different. Or not.
A story I wrote has been posted at the online journal called joyful!, in their January issue.
You’ll find “Grandma’s Sermon” on the 2010 fiction archives page, the last story in January’s section. Like I said, a work of fiction. As Wendell Berry wrote on his novel’s copyright page, “Nothing is [...]