Today I've hit shuffle on a specific playlist in my Spotify account, a playlist a friend challenged me and several other friends to make. A playlist to sum up who we are. This was 2019, and I was granted 15 songs with which to do this. I divided these 15 songs into five phases--Childhood, Adolescence, …
Then Again, Though Lacking
I was sick yesterday, was sick in the sort of way that makes one droopy and useless, overly sensitive and unreliable for anything but draping oneself across surfaces and waiting for some lost thing to return. This is not how I like to be--not the me who has built a life and a self on …
Trading a Toothpick for a Pick Axe
To talk about what I would do if I knew I could not fail is to try to sort out the crossover point between tenable and untenable challenge, between manageable and unmanageable risk, and identify that thing which is just on the other side of the line which I desperately want. Relatedly, I like to …
Redistribution
I thought I could cheat it a little, today's prompt, because Matt and I started watching the movie Sound of Metal about heavy metal drummer, Ruben, who suddenly loses his hearing. And in many early scenes of this movie, we watch action overlaid with silence as the reality of hearing loss settles over Ruben, and …
Small Medicines
In 2020, I read palliatively. Dozens and dozens of inspirational fiction novels by an author first introduced to me when I was a child by my now-many-years-gone grandmother. The scrawlings left for me by my kids on their bedroom chalkboard, or folded-to-miniscule post-its hidden on my pillowcase, or stuck to my bedside lamp. The stickers …
Turns in Its Spaces
I use walks to make claims on things. These claims are silent and hospitable--they take without taking away. They claim in a manner that allows many claimants and no disputes. They claim in the same way that we claim a sunset, or an impressive monument, or any other large or small delight in the landscape …
Addition and Preservation
In 2018, I went on a solo hiking trip to Moab, Utah. I went because at that moment in my life I needed to understand something about myself that I didn't feel I could without it--something about the truth and validity of my personhood, something about who I was, which I hoped this new context …
Resolution
It's a funny thing about me, in that I make use of the starting line of the new year while simultaneously rolling my eyes at its arbitrary power. New things, though, are useful organizing mechanisms--just don't ask me to entirely eschew the part of me that follows whim and instinct. (That Jackie painted an unplanned …
Rather the Ritual
When I sat down to write yesterday's post, I put on a record, Wild Alee by Talos, a fringe indie selection of swirly electronica that I bought in 2019, probably on one of my ritualized walks through Broad Ripple to Indy CD and Vinyl. I put on the record because I was trying to make …
What 2020 Taught Me
Today is the beginning of Writerly and the beginning of daily blogging, and I am shaking off the rust that's settled into my writerly hinges, hoping that the mechanization built in my decades of writing practice will remember its structure and return to fluidity and motion with a little push. The last time I blogged …
Jackie Lutzke 