I've recently been fascinated with time-lapse photography. That's right... photography. I literally just learned a couple weeks ago that many of the time-lapse videos I've enjoyed are actually individual still photos stitched together, not video played back at superfast speed. (As a disclaimer *some* of it is video, but much of it is photography). Maybe a simpler way to say this is "Wow. I didn't know my camera could do that."

So, with the same camera that took action shots at a high school football game on Saturday, (and has taken wedding photos, baby portraits, landscapes, macro shots, and more) I've started to dabble in time-lapse photography. What a versatile tool.

When Jonathan Glazer makes music videos he plays by none of the traditional rules. He does what he thinks needs to be done to tell a great story. This video for Richard Ashcroft's "A Song For The Lovers" is a great example of that. Multiple times he does something that makes you chuckle and think, "can you do that?" [like have the artist singing along to his own song off key or pause the music with a remote.] But at the end, this particular video leaves you wondering what it was really all about.

I spend the night
Yeah looking for my insides in a hotel room

In her book entitled Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle recalls that “as a child, it was through story that I was able to make some small sense of the confusions and complications of life”. Although I am no longer a child, I cannot think of a better way to describe my deep appreciation for Ethan Canin’s collection of short stories entitled Emperor of the Air.

A long time favorite of mine (and a key component in my decision to pursue creative writing), Emperor of the Air is a beautiful book of stories that deal with simple, everyday events experienced by ordinary characters. Canin takes these everyday stories and punctures them with moments so rich you can almost taste them, moments that quietly ask to be noticed amidst the monotony and the steady pace we all become so dependent on. He finds the extraordinary aspects in ordinary situations, and shows how a conversation with a neighbor, an average afternoon at the movies, and a quiet winter evening at home have the potential to shine with meaning and significance.

William Matthews, born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 11, 1942, was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. He was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.

Bill Matthews published his first book of poetry in 1970, Ruining the New Road: Poems. Nine others followed during his lifetime, including A Happy Childhood (1984), Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-91 (1992), and Time & Money, New Poems, which received the 1996 National Book Critics Circle award for poetry. He won the Modern Poetry Association's 1997 Ruth Lilly Award. He was a former chairman of the literature panel of the National Endowment for the Arts and a former president of the Poetry Society of America.