When you’re shivering with loss, let love keep you warm with memories.
—Terri Guillemets
Writer’s Journal
Scoresheet
No volume of history is insignificant, even the worst chapters. Especially the worst chapters.
—Terri Guillemets
Tools for writing
awareness, audacity, awe
authenticity, acumen, angels
coffee, curiosity, cats
dreams, decision, desire, direction, devils
erasers, endurance, experiments
fearlessness, flexibility
grit, guts, goals
honesty, hyperbole, hunger
ink, ingenuity, insanity, insomnia, insecurity
intention, intellect, insight, intuition
purpose, pain, passion, perspective, personality
rawness, reverie, reference
soul, style, spunk, sense, solitude, silence
substance, stubbornness, struggle, sweat
sagacity, skepticism, stationery
typewriter, tea, time
wit, wisdom, what-ifs
wistfulness, wine, window, wings
—Terri Guillemets
In the autumn wood
green-veined leaves suddenly blushing copper
bronze-edged trees swaying in autumn breezes
gold foliage drifting past pewter branches baring all
brass-hued leaflets dying in beauty, falling in grace
—Terri Guillemets
A life with papers
Any real writer — or reader — has had a papercut on the forehead at least once.
—Terri Guillemets
With or without a ladder
Climb from the depths of your soul to the heights of your future.
—Terri Guillemets
Feel it, live it
If you feel beautiful, then you are. Even if you don’t, you still are.
—Terri Guillemets
Folio, foliage, fall
Autumn binds poetry in its own withered leaves.
—Terri Guillemets
Sky-happy
Foggy heavy-gray teary-eyed low-hanging
snow-stuffed melancholy winter clouds
Impulsive wayward turbulent thick-swift-dark
tempestuous hail-angered storm clouds
Sprinkling lighthearted fanciful breeze-drifted
rainbow-nestled April-hued springtime clouds
Enormous white-fluffy fairydust-fringed
frolicsome sun-illumed carefree summer clouds
Thunderous intense restless rain-soaked
lightning-streaked July-dyed monsoon clouds
Azure-skylit sunglow-slanted edge-gleaming
white-silver billowy contemplative autumn clouds
Vivid vibrant blissful dawn-lit joy-beamed
daybreak-florid sunrise-tinted morning clouds
Aimless airy midday-lazy wandering listless
mountaintop-floating leisurely afternoon clouds
Amber-ablaze day’s-end-pink ephemeral-amethyst
evening-welcome smoky-embered sunset clouds
Lambent star-flanked luminous moon-halo’d
glowing shadow-painted skygazers’ night clouds
—Terri Guillemets
Inching along, leaving behind
The poet is a sensitive snail
wandering along the path of life
leaving a glittering trail of words.
—Terri Guillemets
Word altar
An author can be just a writer, but a translator must always be a poet.
—Terri Guillemets
Valerian song
Prose is poetry that can’t stop talking.
—Terri Guillemets