Welcome to my blog Upstate Girl, (a.k.a Follow Your Bliss Part II), I am an independently published author. This blog is all about writing and the stuff that inspires me to write, the joys and obstacles that come along with the writer's life, and my fascination with the psychology of people and what makes them tick...the human condition, as is...and my love for words, playing with them and making sense of them...and I throw in a few photos from my acre of the world just to make things pretty...sometimes there are things I have no words for, only pictures will do.

*Copyright notice* All photos, writing, and artwork are mine (
© Laura J. Wellner), unless otherwise noted, please be a peach, if you'd like to use my work for a project or you just love it and must have it, message me and we'll work out the details...it's simple...JUST ASK, please.

Sunday, June 16, 2013

The White Peony...


Something Georgia O'Keeffe saw once, and I could see it too.


It's raining today, naturally, now it's going to rain because my peonies have finally bloomed (they were tight little fists right up until Friday, being in the higher elevations, I'm a week or two behind everyone else...my spring is longer.)


Abstraction

Swirl
I have more photos than I can count, I was out there hovering around the blooms from early morning to twilight for the last three days...and of course, I couldn't avoid the ants...so I focused on them too...my camera looks forward to photographing these beauties every year...

One Ant
Two Ants



Morning dew on petals

My Daddy when he was a wee one-year-old being held by his father, Rochester, NY


My Daddy, the sailor, posing with his father, Spring 1945

Another Father's Day, I visited with my daddy at the nursing home, he's very frail, his COPD has become more advanced, and although his dementia rules much of his thoughts, he still knows who I am and is glad to see me and sad to see me leave. I'm still mining the family photos, it's a long process...

Monday, June 10, 2013

A Poe-em about Dreams and Realities


Dumpster Abstraction, 5/31/2013



Thoreau said: “To live deliberately,
to front only the essential facts
of life and to see if I could
not learn what it had to teach,
and not, when I came to die,
discover that I had not lived…”

…the trials of life stretch ahead of me.
I am drunk on the prospects; the future
is Wonderland — yet, I’m chronically sad
for the loss of those innocent days; entering
my own simple history, a sentimental composition
of ethereal memories — chasing dust motes in horse
barn sunbeams and butterflies in the meadow —
riding bareback, my legs clamped to the reality of
a warm barrel of horseflesh, furry muscles running
between my knees, charging up the hill to reach the sky,
we fly together, my horse and I; a daydream —
a wish — a hope; desire so sweet — I watch my plans
swim in a fishbowl — a crystal ball in motion.
Plans change when the bowl needs to be cleaned.
Hold on — I stop time to write down words —
random thoughts on bits of paper to save
for later — poetry made by the day drawn out
by hand in a silent night spent in my room;
the dark presses against the window —
the unknown tomorrow leaking into the darkest
hours before dawn. Peeled onion eyes filled with
sleepless dark, I wait impatiently
for the light of day to set me free from
the thoughts reeling inside my mind —
drinking from the fishbowl in Wonderland.
Thoreau said: “There is more day to dawn.
The Sun is but a morning star.”


Drinking from the Fishbowl in Wonderland (Georgia Sullivan’s Dreams and Realities) – 6/7/2013


The words rolled out the other day while I was editing my manuscript, Drinking from the Fishbowl...the poem is based on the main character Georgia Sullivan and her vision of the future as it was played out in chapter one...sort of channeling my little poet girl, and her anxieties. I'm quite happy with the editing process I'm going through this time around...thoroughly enjoying myself and taking my time. I butchered it back in 2007, several chapters gone forever and others bleeding red ink...so this time around is a reconstruction in a good sense. I've learned a lot since then, and my vision is clear. It is distinctly written in three parts and I'm tempted to serialize it as three books before printing them in one volume, but that's just thinking about it, I might keep it together as one book and forget about this trilogy business altogether...who knows. It's going to be a big fat chunk of literary fiction...

 Leave it to me to discover beauty in the dumpster we hired to clear out our garage and shed...random junk jumbled together and the rusty and battered insides of the beast fascinated me for a few days...I probably have over 100 photos...there's no way I can process all of them...

a dumpster collage, 5/31/2013

The Battered Insides, 5/31/2013

The Battered Insides, 5/31/2013


The Battered Insides, 5/31/2013
Then...it wouldn't be a post without a picture of one of our cuties...

Butters