Stories & Letters
A Different Frame of Space: Ronkisms by Miss Patty
With Illustrations by Leonard Cohen
When you realize you have nothing to lose by giving, that’s when you are ready to start. I have thirty-five little sayings like that. But nothing that compares to Miss Patty. Once I had Leonard Cohen’s phone number in my hand. I was visiting a friend who knew him. Then I met him in a restaurant. He never knew I had his number. He never knew I was a poet. We have to tread softly through this world so as to not disturb the wounded.
When I first picked up Miss Patty’s book of Ronkisms I never knew Cohen drew or Miss Patty wrote. Suzanne Townsend is like a mental archeologist. She has unearthed a treasure for us that makes us rethink how we thought before. Art should change us in the same way a beautiful sunset rearranges the molecules of the night.
— S. Fleming
This is the sole publication that was actually printed on a press and bound (by hand, even), about 20 years ago. Today that is out of print, and what you get is a PDF.
Really what it should be is little flash cards, so each one can be read on its own. When you read them one after another, it’s all a bit too much for the brain.
— S. Townsend
The author is alive and well in California.
War
Cassie and Lois were best friends. Cassie wrote this letter to her father in 1938, after she and Lois had completed a bicycle trip around France — the final days of their innocence. They were 18.
1938
Lois gave this account of their adventure and the trip back to the US of A.
Lois and Cassie
Warrior Dharma Troubadors
Hunter Quarterman, Aba Cecile McHardy, John Tischer, Warren Wesson Voss. You simply can’t stop these amazing folks from writing. From the 2006 version of a few lost-and-found lives of House Bound Press.
Cape Breton Gothic:
A Cultural History of the Coalfields
by Edward Michalik
In the Abstract to his dissertation, Ed writes: “Cape Breton Gothic is a postmortem. At some point after the ink dried on Sheldon Currie’s Miners’ Museum (1995) and before Mayor John Morgan issued his out-of-nowhere resignation (2012), the heart of the Island’s mining culture ceased to beat.
As a self-styled coroner, I determined the cause of death.”
Stories by Daniel J. Meade
A bit about Dan, and links to more of his stories, can be found on the Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
A Bright Afternoon
A story of love lost and found, and the inseparability of fantasy and real real real reality.
Butts
Down in the mud where the truth is.
How To Speak the English Language
Meeting the Best Friend That You Will Ever Have
First Drive / First Passenger
Three vignettes by Dan, published on chronicleproject.com.
Conquering Middle America with the Sound of One Finger Snap
A poem CTR wrote for Dan.