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Crescent Dragonwagon

letting an invitation become personally seismic: how I began to grow up

By Crescent Dragonwagon 7 Comments

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Greetings, dear blog-readers! May 1, 2009, is the one-year anniversary of "nothing is wasted on the writer", and I thank you, thank you for your generous responses.  I'm working on an anniversary post: it also happens to be the one-year anniversary of when I stopped using credit cards, as well as the general time of year I begin getting in… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: appreciation, asparagus, change, compassion towards self and others, Eureka Springs, friendship, gardening, gradual transformation, grief & grieving, love, Ned Shank, spring, writing

Part 2: love/ let sleeping cats tell the truth

By Crescent Dragonwagon 14 Comments

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Here in Vermont, there is a moment of exquisiteness in the turning of each year. It only lasts for a few late summer days, days still warm and sun-filled, the outdoors still richly greened with only a few colored leaves, garden still producing. Yet in this charged moment, there's the slightest breath of fall.  These days, close to earthly perfection,… Read More

Filed Under: self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: aging, appreciation, Arkansas, cats, change, compassion towards self and others, David Koff, death, death of a pet, e e cummings, Eureka Springs, friendship, gradual transformation, grief & grieving, home, love, May Sarton, Ned Shank, Vermont, Wislawa Syzmborska, writer's memory, writers, writing

Part 1: love / dead cat

By Crescent Dragonwagon 10 Comments

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I sometimes tell my writing students “Start out with a clear purpose, but be willing for that to change in the course of writing. ” Well, case in point. In this post, sparked by an e e cummings quote, I set out to explore the idea of how one becomes lovable… and wound up writing, mostly, about a dead cat…. Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, Fearless Writing, self-understanding, personal growth, Writing Courses Tagged With: appreciation, cats, change, David Koff, death, death of a pet, e e cummings, Eureka Springs, friendship, gentleness, gradual transformation, grief & grieving, home, love, Momaday, narrative, Ned Shank, writer's memory, writers, writing

“50 year old shoulder”

By Crescent Dragonwagon 8 Comments

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If I want to eat anything else, I have 15 minutes in which to do it. No solid food after midnight. When I hurt my left shoulder about a decade ago, some now-forgotten person said to me, “Rotator cuff, probably. Rotator cuffs just wear out. You know what they call it in Chinese medicine? ‘Fifty year-old shoulder.’” My friend had… Read More

Filed Under: Charlotte Zolotow, Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: aging, appreciation, compassion towards self and others, cooking, David Koff, getting things done, gradual transformation, health, love, narrative, organization, Surgery, writers, writing

several big “O”s (including, but not limited to, October and Obama)

By Crescent Dragonwagon 11 Comments

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It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. It is October in Vermont. It is an election year (and what an election). It is the month of the year that was Ned’s last full month on earth. The best: the transition of the leaves from verdant to plush flame, fuchsia, gold, ochre, orange, salmon, a hundred… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: aging, aging parents, compassion towards self and others, David Koff, death, eldercare, gradual transformation, grief & grieving, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, love, natural world, Ned Shank, oyster mushrooms, puffballs, poetry, sexuality, Vermont, writing, Yeats

gills, guilt, garden… camera, catbox, cauliflower, cosmos

By Crescent Dragonwagon 12 Comments

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Okay, this isn’t the promised Part 3 of my meditations on being in Unity, New Hampshire, with Hillary and Barack back at the end of June, which, God knows, is by now a yuga in the timing of political dialog today… Lord, I may never write part three at this rate, just incorporate the ideas into something else. At any… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: aging parents, appreciation, cauliflower, compassion towards self and others, culinary writing, David Koff, eating locally, gardening, gradual transformation, love, natural world, Ned Shank, peace, photography, Vermont, writers, writing

PART TWO: the political becomes personal (for me)

By Crescent Dragonwagon 8 Comments

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Well-orchestrated? That’s the word with which I concluded Part One of this series: the word NPR used to sum up, in a manner I considered cursory and condescending, the June 27 Clinton/Obama rally in Unity, New Hampshire, which David, my partner, and I attended. My take on that event is continued here: up close, very personal. To see and hear… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: appreciation, compassion towards self and others, David Koff, David Schnarch, death, environmentalism, Eureka Springs, friendship, gradual transformation, grief & grieving, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, love, Ned Shank, peace

PART ONE / the winning ways of a presumptive loser: Hillary’s remarkable acceptance speech

By Crescent Dragonwagon 2 Comments

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Late afternoon, Friday, June 27th, 2008. My partner and I were driving back to Vermont from Unity, New Hampshire. We were sunburned: we’d been outdoors from about ten to two, and neither of us had worn a hat or enough sunblock. We were damp: towards the end of that time, the skies had opened up, bursting very pregnant clouds into… Read More

Filed Under: self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: Arkansas, compassion towards self and others, Eureka Springs, fame, gradual transformation, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, love, narrative, peace, Vermont

blue-ribbon silliness

By Crescent Dragonwagon 6 Comments

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I’m still going through business cards gathered at April’s International Association of Culinary Professionals conference, catching up with what I scribbled on the back of each, reminders of promises made (probably foolishly, but with the best of intentions). If you look at the May 1 post, you’ll see that April was a whole month of bebopping above and beyond IACP…which… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon Tagged With: appreciation, Arkansas, canning & preserving, cooking, Eureka Springs, friendship, love, Ned Shank, writers, writing

Ohhhhhhh-krahoma: eat/be eaten, “write naked” , vegetable chameleons

By Crescent Dragonwagon 2 Comments

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Ohhhhh-krahoma! (Or, the color purple). On Thursday I found actual okra plants, starts, seedlings! (If this doesn’t seem like big news to you , please go back and read the post for May 27). So maybe I will get some honest-to-goodness non "curiosity" okra from my very own garden this year. I’m still going to plant my okra seeds, though,… Read More

Filed Under: self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: Brattleboro, children's book writing, children's books, David Koff, death, eating locally, gardening, grief & grieving, localvore, love, natural world, Ned Shank, poetry, spring, Vermont, writers, writing

My boyfriend’s (almost) back…

By Crescent Dragonwagon 5 Comments

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It’s 10:57 P.M., Wednesday night. I’ve been expecting the phone to ring and it does: David. His plane has landed at BDL, the Hartford, Connecticut airport. He’s just pulling out of the rental car parking lot. In about two hours, he’ll be here. When David was here last weekend, at one point we were fixing something, or maybe doing summerization… Read More

Filed Under: Crescent Dragonwagon, self-understanding, personal growth Tagged With: aging, appreciation, compassion towards self and others, David Koff, friendship, gradual transformation, love, Ned Shank, peace, sexuality, writing

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Read Aloud with Crescent and Mark

NOT A LITTLE MONKEY, by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrted by Michelle Chessaree

"So, the little girl climbed into the big waste-basket and waited." ' Oh no,' said her mother, ' we don't want to throw you away.'"There are many ways to express love and the need for attention. Here, a busy mother and her just-a-bit naughty little girl tease each other affectionately — the little girl making her point without even uttering a word.That's today's story time — read aloud by the author's daughter at Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops, with Mark Graff's "text support" and discussion."Just right for two-to-fours, the humor of this true-to-life story of a mischievous little girl who blocks her mother's attempts to clean house will elicit giggles from the lollipop set." Kirkus Reviews

Posted by Crescent Dragonwagon's Writing, Cooking, & Workshops on Thursday, June 4, 2020

Read Aloud with Crescent

Read Aloud with Crescent

The Washington Post on Crescent’s Lentil Soup Recipe

The Washington Post on Crescent’s Lentil Soup Recipe

Greek Lentil Soup with Spinach and Lemon, photograph by Tom McCorkle, Washington Post

March Offering

March Offering

Bean By Bean Cookbooks

#DeepFeast Recipes

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Dinner with Dragonwagon

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A NAPPA Gold Winner
NAPPA


"... like a warm luminescent blanket at bedtime... softly lulling." -- New York Times


"(With) weary animals, Dragonwagon offers an “alphabet of ways to sleep,” smoothly working in some alliteration..."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)


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read aloud with Crescent Dragonwagon

Until Just Moistened

Until Just Moistened

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