1. Not until the sun goes down. Not even as early as dust motes. Not rainfall or cellulite or oil in the river. Not branches swaying like they do in a storm. Not Hercules or Orion. Not stars or satellites.

 2. As far as I know, it’s Wednesday. The way she looks at you when you use a hammer. All soft and preening. A song floats up from the basement radio. A bright blue flame. I would take you to Paris, I would take you to New York, I would take you to the moon. If treetops. If moonlight and nonchalance.

 3. I’ve been swinging from chandeliers. Anything to not have to stand bare on the concrete in the middle of a crowd. Catch me, I’m falling. Over by the lamp post: a lonely man with a tin cup in his hand asking strangers for spare change. Over by the bus stop, a woman with her winter coat coming loose at the seams. I’ve been waiting my whole life to get here and this is all we get.

 4. That morning there was light cupped in the maple leaves. Oh, liquid, oh, mourning. Tell it to the postman. Tell it to the grocery store clerk. I’m alive though I once was nearly dead. I ran a hundred miles to be here. I dug long and hard in the ground with a garden spade. Was there anything else I could have done?

 5. What happens when you sit there? Does the ground open and swallow you whole? Does a wind come and sweep you away? Does the pale light in the room split you open? No. Stay where you are.

 6. Open it. Turn it on its creaky hinges. There. That’s called being alive. That’s called a roaring ocean. That’s called getting in the boat and sailing toward the horizon. Land is emptiness and emptiness is land. Away you go anyway.

 7. Even with a toothache. Even in a hurricane. Even in a smallish tornado. Even on Sundays and Mondays. Even on a rollercoaster a ferris wheel a train. Even in California or at the bottom of a well. In deep shadows.

 8. The cherry blossoms done now. Nothing here but dust motes and the smell of rain. There is nothing, there is everything, the world is empty and full.

 9. The magnolia out the window is preening in the sun. And summer comes on too fast. Who wants winter? I do. I want the darkness to teach me how to love it.

 10. An ode to uncertainty. An ode to the ground falling out beneath you. An ode to watching things alter and depart. If treetops. If nightfall. An ode to swinging from a chandelier. An ode to lonely men with tin cups and dreary bus stops and torn winter coats.

Poetry Reading: Instructions For Waking Up

Dani Shapiro is the bestselling author of the memoirs Devotion and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, and has been widely anthologized. She has taught in the writing programs at Columbia, NYU, The New School and Wesleyan University, and she is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure. She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Her new book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, was published on October 1.

Design Matters With Debbie Millman: Dani Shapiro

I have always loved the recording of this song. I love the way you can hear the pedal being pressed and released. I love the way you can hear the hammers inside the piano hitting softly, and a slight echo in the small room. 

This song used to be called "Happy" but my good friend Andrew Smith, a notable songwriter himself, said: That's the saddest happy song I've ever heard." 

This song never made it onto an album. The music label I'd recorded it with fell through, and I could never reconcile the complicated feeling in this song, so it was never re-recorded for any project. 

Sometimes we write songs because a song can feel simpler, more manageable than real life does. 

A few years later, I would leave my terrible marriage. 
I would leave the city that made me feel like I was suffocating - too similar to the city of my childhood, too devoid of wild spaces where  I could go to feel connected to the earth.

But when I wrote this song, I was only feeling winter and the broken furnace and the edgy desperation of being at home with my small children and some deep emptiness I was not yet brave enough to name.

Special thanks to Danny McBride and Adam Wittke for the lovely production.

Third night of cold and I can't get warm
The furnace guy comes tomorrow
And every time someone opens the door
Oh, the wind blows in through the house, through the house

I imagine these four walls shaking
Pleading for warmth and springtime
I step outside, get another log for the fire
Before it fades and dies

And night comes too early now
Long before you get home
So we wait while the flames get bright
We're happy, oh we're happy, we're happy 

Don't have a quarter for parking
Yesterday I cut my own hair
But that's all gonna change some day, darling
You just wait and see, wait and see, there there

Meanwhile the frost creeps up the glass
And there's nothing to do but watch the hours pass
You slip your fingers slowing into mine
Oh, the cold can't get through
No, that would never do

Winter Song

Blackbird - Leah West cover of The Beatles Paul McCartney. Guitar by Tom Stinson. Synths by Brigitte. Recorded at Music City Studio with Mike Pederson of Kelowna, BC, Canada. Mixed by Marty Rifkin in Santa Monica, California.

Blackbird - Leah West cover of The Beatles Paul McCartney

With all the madness going on all over the world I woke up this morning and wrote this song. Its a rough little demo but speaks about how we are killing our planet, each other and ourselves. 

I am sad to read the news and pray love prevails. 

Much Love/Peace
JS

Joshua Smith's Album

I Still Pray Sometimes

November Trees

Windows							

It is winter in the prairies
Drifts of snow across the lawn
I am thinking of the summer
When we walked on Corydon

Did we stumble, did we falter?
Did we never learn the way?
It is snowing, it is blowing. 
I could never make you stay

Oh, and do you, do you remember?
How the garden bloomed that June?
And we opened all the windows
And the summer wind came through?

Was it winter that took over?
Did my heart just close up tight
Like the windows of that winter
Frozen up against the night?

Hey hey hey. . .

It is raining and I miss you
It is April by the sea
I have spent all of my dollars 
Still this ache, it follows me

I am lonely now for summer
I am lonely for the wind
That blew in through open windows
Will it ever come again? Will it ever come again?

Did we stumble, did we falter?
Did we never learn the way?
I did not know how to stay

Windows

Kim June Johnson is a Canadian singer-songwriter and poet. Her live shows combine song, storytelling and poetry and are often performed in living rooms and small, intimate settings. Her new single, November Trees, was released this past November. 


Critics have long praised her moving, angelic vocals and her craftsmanship as a songwriter. Written with a maturity and wisdom that calls to mind the classic works of Vashti Bunyan, Carol King and KD Lang, her songs are universal and timeless and sung with an intimacy and openness that are unmistakably her own.

Kim has been recognized by the USA Songwriting Competition and the International Songwriting Competition for several of her compositions, including Calgary and Parachute from her album Paper Sun. She has shared the stage with Chic Gamine, Blackie & the Rodeo Kings, Shari Ulrich, the Marc Atkinson Trio, Little Miss Higgins and Colin Linden.

Canvas & Clay was produced by Marc Atkinson (The Bills). It is Kim’s most pop-oriented record to date and features guest appearances by Daniel Lapp on trumpet and fiddle and Scott White on upright bass.

She calls Hornby Island home.

Winter Song

Kim June Johnson

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