Olivia
Online
K. Gettert Shoemaker
@kss516
Writer, teacher, family person, director of nonprofit dedicated to helping writers. Not always in that order. #WritingCommunity #author #larksongwritersplace
Nebraska, USA
Joined February 2012
1.2K Following
397 Followers
1.7K Posts
The day we made the impossible possible.
@Joseph_Fasano_ I would buy an anthology of the poems you post in your threads. You choose such beautiful poems.
“It was a time of deep suppression and it was a time of high poetry. We were bereft and the world was beautiful.”
‘There was something about the repetition of the walk, day after day, that required me to pay attention. When I got back home I chased it, noseblind, across the internet, because the world had ended and I had nothing better to do.’
Anne Enright:
https://t.co/f7MZp2XhOj
“I promise
we are made of those
who save us”
A love of mine is in tears today with the loss of a former teacher, and all I can do is offer a few words that I believe wholly. This is about all the teachers who give so much and stay with us always as our guides.
Who to follow
The Good Life Review
@goodlifelitmag
The Good Life Review is a seasonal online literary journal committed to exploring the overlooked. We are based out of Omaha, Nebraska!
Caroljean (yesonelongword) Gavin
@caroljeangavin
Author: Caught in the Throat Editor: What I Thought of Ain't Funny. Reader @uncharted_mag_ Words @barrelhouse @xraylitmag @moonrabbitcandy she/her
MAB
@ma_boswell
Probably unfriended by your mom | Words in @xraylitmag @misterbullbull @TBQuarterly @jmwwjournal @hobartpulp | Managing editor @goodlifelitmag
@ChattJazz @CheriJacobus @BadBradRSR @JudyPete @MalcolmNance Are you saying Pouty McCon Face was NOT showing defiance and strength?
@_JoyCastro I’ll file this under things I wish I didn’t know. Cross filed under please don’t be true.
This is for Maui, from a far away friend. I am so terribly sorry.
@rainbowrowell I hate the updates. Hate. Them.
The pain on this woman’s face. Heartbreaking. Politics are personal. Very very personal.
Picture, 1000 words. 🎯 #TNSpecialSession
This is still the best business advice I've ever received:
Think like a farmer
@MollyJongFast Can I vote for more than one option?
I am here. Those three words contain all that can be said— you begin with those words and you return to them.
- Czeslaw Milosz, VISIONS FROM SAN FRANCISCO BAY 🖤
This made me ugly cry. Our dogs…
This is a beautiful letter from Fiona Apple explaining to her fans why she must postpone a concert date.
I am impressed at the way she was instantly able to make the decision to choose love over her career. Indeed, the world needs more of this.
Enjoy the story...
“It's 6pm on Friday, and I'm writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I'm writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.
Here's the thing.
I have a dog, Janet, and she's been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She's almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.
She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.
She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.
She's almost 14 and I've never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She's a pacifist.
Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We've lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it's always really been just the two of us.
She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.
She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.
The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she's used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.
She has Addison's Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.
Despite all this, she's effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she's the one who taught me what love is.
I can't come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.
She doesn't even want to go for walks anymore.
I know that she's not sad about aging or dying.
Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That's why they are so much more present than people.
But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She'll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.
I just can't leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I'm afraid she'll die and I won't have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.
Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.
But this decision is instant.
These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.
I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable and comforted and safe and important.
I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.
Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I've ever known.
When she dies.
So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I'm asking for your blessing.
I'll be seeing you.
Love,
Fiona”
This story about police in a small Kansas town raiding the local newspaper and seizing items in a way that seems illegal is chilling and cannot be tolerated. Time to spread this story far and wide and pressure local officials to explain themselves. https://t.co/pRW2ddK62j
This outrage should absolutely be a national story and a cause for journalistic solidarity. Shame these people … Police stage 'chilling' raid on Kansas newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones https://t.co/nhrye1dJi2
Learn songwriting w American folk singer-songwriter Cliff Eberhardt!
Online class Monday, August 14th, 6 to 8 pm CENTRAL time.
Sign up! You know you want to!
Follow the link https://t.co/3ZBREuqrJC
#songwriting #music #folksinger #musicians #poets
@victoriabwrites I’m always confusing it w the X that closes the page.
@timschaffert The stance is perfect on this one.
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