by Marilene Phipps | Jan 21, 2019 | Writing
Leo waits every morning at the bathroom sink for me to turn the water on so he can drink, immobile, curled up, confident. He knows that I will come, stands up with a purr when I do, stares into my eyes, mews with a low sound that fills his throat. Once he has drunk,...
by Marilene Phipps | Dec 4, 2018 | Writing
We are more than we know. The presentation of my memoir, Unseen Worlds, at the Miami Book Fair was scheduled for Sunday November 18th—the Sabbath day of the Lord and the celebrated date of the Haitian Battle of Vertières. My father would always sing on that day, a...
by Marilene Phipps | Oct 12, 2018 | Writing
One may hear that “a picture is worth a thousand words”—I imagine that “pictures” also encompass photographs, drawings, images, posters, paintings, murals and the like. But if we consider the “picture world” from either side of seeing or being seen, we realize that...
by Marilene Phipps | Oct 6, 2018 | Writing
Happy! It was the best of times, all of us singularly alive and loved, feasting in a land of immense forests, sunlit meadows, sparkling coves, sandy beaches and clean waterfalls. We were the great immortals! “I will die just once!” Victoria said to me, just...
by Marilene Phipps | Sep 21, 2018 | Writing
So your mother, the glory of your youth, has just died. She had become just a shivering, dependent, but all-compassionate being. No soul could have been gentler. She softly shuffled through the house, an oxygen tank by her side where once her beloved husband had been;...
by Marilene Phipps | Sep 13, 2018 | Writing
How to let go of one’s mother? How to let her die after the magnitude of years during which she was the boulder that our roots have clamped themselves over and around, absurdly daring follicles unwittingly holding her at the center of our being? Then converging beyond...
