Category: Music

Blindness and Disability, Music, Samples, Writing

Warding Off Eclipses with Sex and Music: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley
My Binder Cover
My Binder Cover

I was fourteen. I was an alternative rock goddess. I’d found Nirvana. I was in love with a dead man.

I sat with my brother Randy, my neighbors and my friend Lissa from blind camp in the very back of the backyard on pink plastic chairs. “So, which would you rather do?” said Ryan from across the street, turning to me. We were playing Questions. “Have sex with Kurt Cobain for one hour, Eddie Vedder from Pearl Jam for ten hours, or the guy from Silverchair for twenty hours?”

I was a loyal girl. “Kurt,” I answered without a thought. “Okay, Lissa. If you were going out with a guy and he wanted to 69, would you do it?”

Continue Reading–>

~~~

Hahaha, so, it only continues from there. This chapter was published in Shark Reef a few years ago and so is also available through the Published page on the site, but I know sometimes those things can be hard to find so I thought I’d bring it out for this week’s writing sample. Fair warning: it’s not a particularly easy read. Still though, I once was reading a passage from this piece at an Open Mic type deal and was laughing so hard I was crying and could barely read and almost peed my pants.

As always, for more writing samples, you can always check out the Samples page. There’s also a section for Published and Early Work (most of this latter section is downright mortifying, but you know, oh well).

~Chrys

Music, Samples, Writing

Island Orcastrations

Chrys Buckley

sucia-island-ewing-cove-view-orcas-island-mt-constitutionTo get to Orcas Island in Northwest Washington, you have to take a ferry. Many of the 4,000 year-round residents come from the fringes of society—hippies, ex-hippies who settled down and had “indigo children,” drug addicts, recovering addicts, organic gurus who live off the grid and prepare for Peak Oil, retirees, healers, felons, millionaires, artists, and other assorted misfits and runaways. In 57 square miles there’s not one record store or regular concert venue, but music on Orcas permeates the atmosphere and is as soft around the edges as its characters.

At solstice parades, local ceremonies and the Farmer’s Market, performers range from saxophonists and a cappella groups to a World Fusion band called Orcatraz. In summer, there’s “Music in the Park” every Sunday night and “Brown Bag Concerts” on the green every Wednesday at noon. Both feature feel-good fare. There’s always reggae at the Oddfellows Hall, where local dances and holiday festivities happen. And now, for the second winter in a row, the island is having its own Orcas Idol contest.

Continue reading “Island Orcastrations” →

Music, Samples, Writing

She’s a Girl Rising From a Shell: A Memoir Chapter

Chrys Buckley

So today, I’m giving you a full chapter from my memoir Moonchild. Now, this is actually up on this site but almost no one has found it, so I’m just pulling it out of hiding. Link is at the bottom of the post.

Another interesting tidbit: Seven years ago, I did a full-length spoken word performance show thingy-dingy and this was the first piece I read at the show. The other day, while on a rampage looking for the earliest version of my manuscript, I came across the recordings from that show. So I am toying with the idea of putting the audio up with the chapter. I don’t know. It has people’s real names. And whenever I hear my recorded voice, I sound like a twelve-year-old with a cold. But I’ll let you decide, should I include audio or no?

All the chapter titles from this book are lyrics from songs. This one comes from the song “Ribbons Undone” by Tori Amos, on her 2005 CD, The Beekeeper. I wrote this piece during that spring, with that album infusing into every corner of my life. At the time, I was about to leave Camp Orkila, where I had lived and worked for more than two years, and my brother was about to graduate college and my sister was about to graduate high school. The theme of graduation kept playing through my mind and it just felt like I was coming to the end of a journey that had started when I first left for college, which is what this chapter is about.

It was one of those things where you look back at the beginning of something and ask yourself, if you had ANY clue where it all would lead, would you do it over again? I was looking back at a time of innocence, of blissfully not knowing what that journey would entail, so this song, where Tori looks at her young daughter starting out on life journeys, just completely resonated with me at the time I was writing and the time I was writing about. It’s a really sweet song and if I’m feeling especially sentimental, it will totally make me cry. I’m a sap like that.

Another cool tidbit: About a year after I wrote the piece, I woke up one morning, way too early, to the sound of my ringing phone. Who the f was calling me at 6 in the morning? It was Tori Amos’ dad, calling from Maryland (where this story mostly takes place) to give me permission to use the lyrics. He also told me I should change the name of my book (which I did, back then it was called Learning to Swim, which is now a tattoo rather than a book title). Anyway, I always thought that was kinda cool.

BUT ENOUGH OF THIS BLATHERING. Here it is:

She’s A Girl Rising From a Shell

I decided to go with the audio addition, so here it is:

Now I’m going to go back to editing this same book manuscript, and listening to Rihanna. For real yo. Cannot even believe I’m fessing up to that but yeah, I kinda can’t get enough of a certain song. Have a good weekend everyone!

~Chrys

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Music, TV, Writing

Holy Crap, Dawson’s Creek Just Quoted Harry Chapin

Chrys Buckley

harrychapin dawsonscreek

What kind of alternate universe am I living in?

Apparently one alternate enough that I am actually watching Dawson’s Creek. I never watched it when it was on, even though I was right around that age. It just never appealed to me. I wasn’t watching much TV then and when I did it was pretty much just The X-Files. But then after the end of the past school year, I was just looking for some TV to relax to, something to help me unwind from the insane intensity of the last year, something that wouldn’t really make me think, and a friend suggested Dawson’s Creek.

Continue reading “Holy Crap, Dawson’s Creek Just Quoted Harry Chapin” →

Music, Writing

A Song to Discuss Into the Night

Chrys Buckley

crowsDuring the spring of my freshman year of college, I stayed up late a lot, usually on really rainy nights it seemed, and talked to people on IRC chats who I knew through a music forum. I was on the east coast so even though it was really late for me, after all kinds of other activities, it wasn’t as late for people in other time zones. We talked about music, books and movies, music, our lives, music, the meaning of life, the future of the universe, and more music.

Around this same time, I really got into Counting Crows. I had never paid them all that much attention to them in the “Mr. Jones” heyday but a college friend lent me “August and Everything After” and “This Desert Life” and I was instantly enamored. There are so many great songs on those albums.

Continue reading “A Song to Discuss Into the Night” →

Blindness and Disability, Music, Science, Writing

I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

Chrys Buckley

IMG_0335So, for whatever reason, I’ve been feeling like putting some of my writing up, so here is a poem I wrote a few years ago, followed by the story of how it came to be.

I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star

When I’m a sea star
I hold the sea’s mystery in my purple
Yet I live at the tips of my spines
Erected like walls to protect
My soft center from being hurt or feeling
The hurt I’ve already been.
As I scavenge along the bottom
For bull kelp and sea lettuce
I cling to any steady surface
With tube feel like a miser who knows
I don’t deserve the water
And I don’t let anyone touch me

Sometimes I’m a sea cucumber
Spikes only ward my demons off for show
I let them go tender
And as I lay exposed
My past creeps up behind me
Slithering inside my open sores
Carrying their torches of truth
I feel them settle in my gut
So I twist it around them, bunch it up
With a hurl I eviscerate my organs
And scramble to grow new insides

Once I was an octopus
Used eight arms to lift the top of the holding tank
Squeezed out, dropped to the floor and crawled
Through the crack under the door
Famished on the sand, inching forward
Telling myself I will not let them
Make me let myself die
If I can give me a little slack and a lot of love
I might make it
Back to the deeper seas I knew before captivity
Where they can’t coax me back
To put me in the big tank, captive
For their audience
I am free

On a blue moon I’m a blue dolphin
On waves with deeper frequency
Intelligence unfocused on rational thought
Feel no shame for stranding myself
To help a member of my pod in need
Sensed out with echolocation
Weathered harsh, howling storms
By surrendering to their windblown frenzy
I know the patterns of Earth’s turning
I have been to blue depths

Today I just want to be
Myself
Deep down
I am
The sea.

Continue reading “I Am Not Your Touch Tank Sea Star” →

Music, Science

Gearing up for Winter 2010

Chrys Buckley

psuskybridgeClasses start on Monday! In one sense it feels like I’ve been on break forever, and in another it feels like it’s all starting up again so soon.

My main class will be the continuation of the biology class I took last quarter. This time though, the focus will be on evolution for the first half of the term and plant form and function for the second half of the term. I’m excited for both, though I read somewhere that in the evolution section the students have to memorize phylogenetic trees (basically these charts with branches showing how closely or distantly different species are related based on their rRNA sequences) and that sounds a bit tedious.

Continue reading “Gearing up for Winter 2010” →

Music, Science

Class Sign-Up Predicament (A Blessing in Disguise?)

Chrys Buckley

7f6512_woman_singing_into_microphone_in_silhouette_300So I have a bit of a predicament for signing up for classes.

I have to take between 6-8 credit hours each term this year. If I take less than six, I don’t get financial aid. If I take more than eight, then it’s more than half-time, and I simply can’t afford it even with the financial aid. Also if I take eight or less all year, then next year I can be considered an Oregon resident for the rest of my schooling, which will make all the difference in the world. I will seriously be paying less going full-time next year as a state resident, than I am this year at half-time. By a pretty significant amount!

So pretty straightforward, right? 6-8 credits shouldn’t be too hard to manage. Most classes are 4, so it should be easy.

Except that the Biology class I’m taking is a 5-credit class b/c it includes the lab. So that alone is not enough, and if I add any regular class, that puts me at 9 and I’m over my limit. So what it basically means I have to do is take some more unusual classes.

Continue reading “Class Sign-Up Predicament (A Blessing in Disguise?)” →

Music

After the Ecstacy, the Laundry

Chrys Buckley

LollaA few years ago, I went to this amazing writers retreat weekend put on by The Sun magazine in Big Sur, CA, and during the last morning we were all gathered and talking about what we felt about the end of the workshop, and a lot of people expressed some degree of sorrow at having to go back to their real lives, and someone brought up the quote that is the title of this blog post, which I think was originally said by some spiritual teacher or something. Ever since that workshop, I think of this quote anytime I’m saying goodbye to any kind of supercool experience and going back to my regular life, and that is the case this morning.

Continue reading “After the Ecstacy, the Laundry” →

Music, Science

Moving Right Along

Chrys Buckley

PSULogoTomorrow will mark two weeks after my return from India, and it feels like life is moving pretty quickly and changes are happening fast.

I made a decision about which college to go to pretty quickly after returning home, and I think in many ways, I had already made the decision, deep down, beforehand. I’m going to Portland State, which is the same school that my India program went through, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’m still a little sad that some of my top choice schools didn’t work out, though I’m also seeing it in some ways as what Julia Cameron would call “Gain disguised as loss,” because the more I move forward in this process, the more right PSU feels, so there’s also a part of me that’s glad some of the other schools didn’t work out.

Continue reading “Moving Right Along” →