Tag: Chris Cornell

Writing

In Search of Censored Paragraphs

Chrys Buckley

Another imported post, this one from June 2008. Quick fun fact: Diana Abu-Jaber actually teaches at my university but I’ve never taken a class from her.

Crescent Diana Abu-JaberWhen I first went to Diana Abu-Jaber’s website, I noticed something on there about a school in Texas banning her book Crescent and a link to the offending paragraphs. At the time, I was on a bit of a linking spree and I didn’t stop to read more. Crescent was a great book, but it’s been years since I read it and I read it on loan from a friend and I couldn’t think what would be offensive about it. It’s a story featuring Iraqi-Americans and so I thought maybe it had something to do with that. Mostly though, Crescent is a love story, rich with myth and story and family, faraway homelands, poetry and cooking. Reading that book will make your mouth water for certain.

Years ago, Diana Abu-Jaber came to Orcas for a signing/reading at our local bookstore, and I didn’t find out about it until afterward. Neither did my friend who’d loaned me Crescent. We were disappointed we’d missed her. Last week, I was pointing out Crescent to my good friend Leo and looked at some of her other books and ended up picking up her first novel, Arabian Jazz and just started reading it the other day.

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Music, Writing

My Table of Contents Looks More Like the Song List on a Soundtrack…or Something

Chrys Buckley

call her moonchild

So, all my chapters (except for the first four that cover childhood), are named after song lyrics. In fact, I’ll just put the list of songs on here, to give an idea, and then I want to talk about the general motivations. Some songs come up more than once, (“Moonchild” by Chris Cornell, for example), different lyrics are used in each chapter. That song is the repeating refrain of the story, for sure. Anyway, for now, I’ll just give song title and artist.

Here’s the current table of contents:

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Writing

Home, Home Again

Chrys Buckley

eastcoastfallimages…and I can definitely say, to quote another band, “what a loooooooong, strange trip it’s been.”

Three weeks and a day of traveling all over the east coast. I went from Philly to Allentown, PA, from there a quick trip up to Albany for a concert, then back to Allentown, then Boston, then Baltimore, then back to Allentown, then to NYC, then to Philly (with a trip from NYC out to Long Island to meet my ride back to Philly). Then yesterday morning, I left Philly for my trek back to Orcas Island, which, all told, took 18 hours.

In a way it was a rock star kind of trip, waking up in all these different cities. So many nights, I had the sensation of coming in or out of sleep and being disoriented, wondering where I was. It was great. Throughout the trip, I slept on couches, in two hotels, in a basement spare room, in a shared twin bed in a dorm room and on a pullout couch. I saw so many friends it was amazing. Not just the ones I stayed with, but friends I saw at concerts, friends who came to my reading in New York City, a friend who I rarely get to see and who is going to Iraq in January. We met for two hours, went out to eat at a brewery, it was the fourth time I’ve seen in the last seven years. I get a little choked up sometimes, just thinking about how precious it is to have these short encounters with people who matter.

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Writing

Writing from the road – Allentown, PA

Chrys Buckley

housetitleindexIt’s been a long time since I wrote anything here on my blog. No, I didn’t fall off the face of the Earth, but let me tell you guys, the latest Mercury Retrograde hit hard. I can’t blame it all on that though, as it started before, and lasted until after. I will be honest, I spent most of late September and October lounging around my house, cleaning, organizing and rearranging my house, and watching HOUSE.

I will digress to say, I’ve watched the entire series THREE TIMES. Yes, I’m sure that sounds pathetic to anyone who isn’t me, and I’m sure it probably is, but here’s the thing. First of all, I went through every part of my house – kitchen drawers, closets, the chest that the TV sits on, the shelves in my bedroom closet and the cabinets under my bathroom sink. I totally reorganized everything. When I first moved into my apartment, a year and a half ago, I was seeing Adrian and he soon moved in with doggie, and it was all haphazard, with some organization as we went along (he was actually very clean and liked to arrange the house, which was great because at the time, I was pretty much a slob). For months I’ve felt like I wanted to re=organize, really make things mine, that sort of thing, but never got around to it. Until I downloaded all the seasons of House. I put on the pilot episode and wandered over to the kitchen.

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Blindness and Disability, Music, Writing

A rough sketch of my book – Moonchild: A Memoir of Albinism

Chrys Buckley

moonchildimagesNote: This description can also be found on the Personal Essay and Memoir page.

I am albino. Albinism is a recessive genetic condition that means my skin and hair are white, and I’m legally blind. After a sheltered and chaotic childhood, during which I worried that my parents would murder me in my sleep, I felt more different on the inside than I am on the outside. I lost (and found) myself in alternative rock music and counted down the days until I could escape to college. I felt eclipsed.

Moonchild: A Memoir of Albinism details my freshman year at college. As I dealt with finding my way around college, I had intense social anxiety. I didn’t know how to talk about albinism with people, so I didn’t. I was at school on a creative writing scholarship, and I had writer’s block as big as the Great Pyramid of Giza. I wasn’t even sure if I felt anymore. The eclipse deepened.

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