Dear readers,

According to Joyce Carol Oates, in her book: “The Faith of a Writer”, writing is the most lonely of the arts. This because the writer abandon the outsider world in order to build the “new world” of words or emotions and adventures. What is individual is portraid regardless of the outside influences, forgetting evertything we would like to forget, and including all the elements we want to remember.

To write is an art: (i) with its origin in the concept of game, improvisation, experimentation; (ii) fed by rebelion, a need to resist; (iii) a memorization of the past; and a (iv) form of an inner fight of an artist, a person, who feels, since ever, a need to complete his/her life. The author acknowledges that “everything happens between the paper and the hand that writes” as Samuel Beckett would say.

And why ice creams when writing? Well, if we feel an interior movement, an anxiety, a need to fill in a blanck page, then we also need something to refresh ourselves. Specially, if during Summer. At the end, its colours and flavours can be an inspiration for new words and new inner worlds…

This book is a tool to understand how to write, a path for the writing technique. At the same time, it is a statement transmiting the idea of writing as an activity only humainement valuable if it has art in it. To write is an act of art creation and not only a technical act.

Enjoy.

Dear friends,

Today we remember the news about the ice-free Arctic.

Here a webpage with more information:

https://universemagazine.com/en/arctic-to-lose-ice-cover-in-2027/#:~:text=Arctic%20sea%20ice%20is%20melting,is%2C%20between%202027%20and%202030.

Additionally, we share a poem by Thomas Hardy, about Christmas and fantasy.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
“Now they are all on their knees,”
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,”
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Source: Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53215/the-oxen-56d232503c32d

Enjoy.

Iced Stone

There is a voice inched on ice stoned walls,

Hurled in an echo of phantom deep lunges,

Faded fast on a midnight run,

I was the girl without a song,

Longing for my hymn to break me free,

I yearned for you beyond the ocean sea.

The tears of rivers by lakes iced stone,

Voices haunt the nightmares which left me all alone.

I think of you in dreams gone wrong,

I only hear you call there,

For I awake and you have disappeared.

What is an iced stone wall without a castle,

It simply melts in the heat,

All the melted water sings,

It sings the waves to sleep,

But not me I stay awake,

I walk these waters all alone,

The storm before me has passed,

But it robbed with it your soul.

By Claire O' C.

Want some art for your book? You can contact me using the e-mail of this website.

Enjoy.

There is a horrible situation in California that we can not remain indifferent to ... Maybe we can donate something and for this it is important to read this publication:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/reader-center/california-fires-how-to-help.html

Meanwhile we expect better news and we remember our literary contest of poetry and short stories related to nature and its preservation!

Bests!