Reading For Snow

Alki Beach, West Seattle

I celebrated the beginning of the year with my dear friend Geraldine Mills and her partner, photographer, Peter Moore, visiting from Ireland.

Geraldine and I met 13 years ago at The Tyrone Guthrie Center; it was my first time in Ireland. Since that residency we've become close friends. One ritual we've developed is a reading our poems to an audience of bells, mountain goats, river stones, or literal snowflakes---and of course each other. There's something so satisfying about our shared love of words and the natural word where we set our poems free. It's nearly primal: the act of reading our work to clouds and "the vagaries of weather" to quote my friend. She's a stunning poet and fiction writer. Her books are available on both sides of the Atlantic. Here's a link to HellKite --- a superb collection.

And here is the beginning of Geraldine's blog post about her time in my neighborhood. And if you live in Seattle, Easy Street Cafe and Records is definitely worth a visit.


From Geraldine Mills

True friendships are those that hold through absence and long distance. Having the chance to meet up with my dear friend and poet, Susan Rich, last weekend, filled me with gladness as once again my husband and I took the ferry across Puget Sound to meet her in her home in Seattle.

It was time luxuriously shared with good food, discussion on favourite writers and the mystery that is this life of ours. In her house of sky we could see from her writing room red-tailed hawks and the snow on the Olympic Mountains. Spending those precious hours talking with her and her partner, Jeff, soon opened that squeaky door of creativity for me that is inclined to blow shut sometimes from all the storms of life and living.

We had breakfast in the Easy Street Café, food for the body and the soul with its collection of vinyls and CDs, and a menu that mirrors the music on the stands. Trying to decide between a Dolly Parton Stack or a Salad of John and Yoko, I finally settled on a Little Richard: Eggs, bacon and hash browns.

One of our traditions that we have built since our first meeting in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre, many years ago is to find a place To continue reading go to GeraldineMillsWriter