L.L. Barkat is Managing Editor of Tweetspeak Poetry, a site committed to helping people experience a whole life through the power of writing, reading, and just plain living. She is the author of six books, including the award-winning Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing.
A 3rd-of-July story from our archive
On the third of July, I sat on my back porch with a cup of English Breakfast. I was there to write an essay about the Fourth of July. As is often my way, I look to the things around me to inform my writing path at any particular moment. It makes my life simpler to write […]
Taking the Crisis Out, Letting a Person Be
The End is a logical place to begin when you are middling.
Technology: We Come for the Sugar (and the Cat)
Relatively invisible technology, like invisible pheromones, leads us to the possibility of intimate connection.
The Unbearable Lightness of Not Being
We have been growing lighter, staring at screens that do not exert equal force upon our senses.
Technology: Finding Our Way Back from the Flatness
My inbox is Alaska. My Facebook alerts: Alaska, Alaska, Alaska.
This is why I did it, Donna: the bees are dying. She is five years old and I do what every parent is expected to do. I register my child for kindergarten. But I am wanting a half-day option, so I visit the school to see if I can work some magic in my daughter’s […]
The Creative Life: Risking for Love
This is the risk. Children might choose to be different than we are. They might choose to be different than somebody out there thinks they should be. The risk is to our ego, the carefully packaged entity that, in part, exerts its pressure on our children, not for the sake of helping them become who they really are, but for the sake of our own desires which may even press them to live a life we had wished for ourselves.
Give and Take: The Paradoxical Function of Art
This is one function, perhaps, of great art and the work of people like me who seem, at first blush, to explain it.
It could have been ten lima beans or it could have been twenty-seven or maybe a hundred and four. I never counted. That is the measure of comfortable love—those numbers we cannot remember…
Higgins Writes the Poetry of the Gods
My little heel-wings are not made of feathers:/
they are made of tongues…
How I Am Not Learning French in Eight Weeks or Less
Maybe in a decade I will, belatedly, surge with political passion or faint from shock or love. One cannot predict what ten years of after-bath French will do to a person.
Opening Your Life to Purple-Bottled Dreams
“I am not a poet,” I said to the room.
Why devote a year to a stunt? Wasn’t there something inherently suspect about that? Might it not be a waste of time?
Stealing Norton: Do You Work at Your Art?
Why try to master these things called words? Isn’t writing an art? Doesn’t that mean we can just let things pour out as they will?
I am thinking of buying a pistol. Because, today, my stove unilaterally changed its clock to military time. (Just what, I ask, must a stove be planning, to take such measures?)
On a day when I am overwhelmed and cannot think of a single thing to write about, the cabbage presents a challenge to tell the world that the writer is never at a loss.
“We want to live off the grid,” she tells me.
Snow has fallen on Penn Avenue/ as golden morning, fallen, melting/ and I walk past Heinz dead sign/ pouring wishes red by ruffled bird
A long time ago, my mother gave me the ritual of tea. It was a comfort, like the poetry she read to me each day before the school bus came.
I close my eyes, / blot out one hundred / and fifty shale driveways
A poem/photo essay in collaboration with Kelly Langner Sauer.
A poetic photo essay featuring photographer Claire Burge.
Where was the room that saw the necessity for both-where inside and out were purposely, inextricably linked?
The Perverse Monstrosity of Our Beautiful Art
The problem with extreme criticism is that it doesn’t tell the whole story – or maybe it does, but in an unexpected fashion.
A photo essay on Times Square and singing past tragedy.
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