Hello dear readers, writers and those who are both,

Signals of membership often more subtle than obvious.
Café Rico yesterday, Erin talking about visiting her mother’s village. One of her mom’s final requests: “spread my ashes there.”
Erin talking of the Second World War Ukrainian Nationalists’ strategy for figuring out who were the Ukrainian Poles.Food in Polish and Ukrainian The person in question was asked the names of various foods. As simple as that: a word automatically emits from your mouth and your life is over.

March 2009. Oscar sipping her Emerald Silver Green morning tea, gazes at backyard tree’s Matisse-like limbs against fresh blue. Oscar. Waiting for Oscar. Having worked on writing the final essay for Breathing the Page all week. Oscar. Wondering, would Oscar appear here? Here being Montreal. In all this difference where she finds most affinity with other writers. Oscar sensing Oscar nearing for three days now — trying to elbow out more space.

In 1963, at sixteen years of age, Oscar made her first visit here, on the Detroit side of the river. The Luther League Convention. A group from her church taking the train to attend. Detroit. Their anxious mothers. Sew them all matching plaid jackets. Membership flags of their little rural community worn on their torsos. Oscar now gazes across at Cobo Hall: site of their convention. Recalls. Viscerally.

What to say – Oscar quickly assesses – decides to take a risk. Abridges: Time Out “Museums” listing jumping out at her; sense of a nascent narrative circling her; immediate revelation upon entering camouflage exhibit; lifelong inexplicable bewilderment exiting her body. Oscar notices Elee’s deep attention; softening of body; paling as though something is reorienting within her; then flush of face as Elee responds. “That’s amazing. I really felt that.” Then. Their mutual recovery. Oscar quietly stunned.

Circling the writing. Dog instinctively beating down the grass, its pre-domesticated memory intact despite laminate floor chill.
Sadness: disenchantment with words then camouflaged with other words?
Oscar recalling her lines from What Holds Us Here —
and whether story entertains,
claims, blames or explains
its instinct the same:
to keep sadness at bay

Time is everything. With everything.
The difference between: The First Time; The Last Time.
And between? “Time will tell.”
Virginia journaling about her nascent sense of writing Mrs Dalloway, how the “life of a woman” …might be told with almost “one incident – say the fall of a flower … my theory being that the actual event practically does not exist – nor time either.”

Category: Oscar’s anathema.
Although others’ descriptions for her loneness change over the years – tomboy, headstrong, stubborn, independent, odd, rebellious, arrogant, different, unrealistic – they all signal the same condition: one who does not play enough by the rules.
Categories being embodiment.
Of rules.
Being self-regulating
: automatic surveillance system.