CHILA WOYCHIK
Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
Franz Kafka
The Query from Port Yonder Press (July 2020), #1 in the Maddie Hill Mysteries series of novellas. ________ A small press publisher. Pan Am Flight 103. A strange manuscript query. How does it all fit together? Maddie Hill is passionate about her book press, but when last day submissions happen, she's also relieved. That is, until she receives several confusing emails, phony names, and veiled threats. Not to mention, she misses Sasha, though she’d never admit it. And is her mentor really who he says he is? Everything eventually comes to light after several cat and mouse hours of who-did-what-and-why. Available from Wellington Square Bookshop and Amazon. 
Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology from Shanti Arts Publishing, Maine (May 2020), a collection of previously published essays reformatted into a month-by-month look at rural living. Autographed copy link below. Barnes & Noble, Walmart.com, Amazon, Wellington Square Bookshop _______ "A ... meditation on the wonder of small moments, artfully told." Kirkus Reviews If you'd like an autographed copy of Singing the Land for yourself or a friend, click the Buy Now button below and follow the instructions.
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EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION to Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology
An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography A Brief Discussion of Time The shadow under the wall clock is in the shape of a mountain connected to an overhanging cliff. A thin crevice runs north and south and joins the two— the mountain to the cliff. About halfway down the crevice another rock juts out, leaving only a marginal line of light, wide enough for a small fly or maybe two or three legs of a spider. Eventually the shadow blurs and disappears. The mountain turns to plain and the clock ticks on. Another day, and I’ve already considered dying, heaven, the likelihood of absolute truth, and this weekend’s company. There are no guidelines in this land of time, no rule book to interpret such a scene, so we live them on a hunch and the proverbial prayer, but always at the precipice of discovery. This is day. This is the next item on the agenda. I prepare a grocery list. A day is made up of this thing called time, measured in microscopic increments by which we mark our happenings. It’s a quantifiable medium, and there’s a method to it all, called chronometry: the science of time. Want to impress someone? Tell them one of the shortest measures of time is called a yoctosecond (10–24s) and the longest, a yottasecond (1 septillion seconds, or about 31.7 quadrillion years). That should do it. Decades ago, Native Americans would estimate time by how long it took a small boat with a hole in it to sink. Today we have clocks and keep our boats for fishing. Further, there is no word in the Sioux language for “late.” Imagine never having to use that excuse with your boss. A tribe in South America dismisses the notion of past and future, living only for the present. It’s a freeing life, observers note, albeit shallow as shown in their limited activities of hunting, gathering, having sex, babies, and then dying. They have no numbering system and use only a few vowels and a handful of consonants. They whistle conversation, or hum it, or sing it. Why would they need a concept of time when they live in the lyricism of the present? Missionary Daniel Everett spent years with the Pirahas and left no closer to convincing them of their need for a clock. Time discipline is how we view our passing seconds and years. This desire to measure our moments is believed to have sprung from a religious emphasis on daily rituals and a religious view of the hereafter. Canonical hours, prayer schedules, and the now-ubiquitous phrases such as “don’t waste your life” drove the need for devices to calculate time. From the sundial to the hourglass to the candle or 35 Singing the Land pendulum clock to the clepsydra all the way up to the ultra-precise NIST-F2 atomic clock (which is accurate to within one second in 300 million years, on a bad day), we, as a people, have sought to number our days.... |
The Farm & Environs (corn is not ours; planes are not ours; everything else is, including sky, clouds, and sunset)
