Love, Your Artsy Girl

http://www.cristinaquerrer.com

Buddha's Dog & Other Meditations by Ira Sukrungruang Living in the Tampa Bay area for some years now, aside from finally attending AAWP this year that was held in Tampa, I wanted to know what writers live around me.  Lo and behold, there is a prominent writer who is also Asian American. Thai-American to be exact and his name is Ira Sukrungruang and he is a creative writing professor at University of South Florida's MFA program. I have heard his name in certain circles before, but I searched University of Tampa's booth out at the writer's conference and got to meet Ira and purchase his latest collection of personal essays. Let me tell you, what depth and breadth of his prose, though seemingly personable in diction, like listening to your best friend confessing his or her worries and fears, it is balanced with a great amount of humor and heartbreak.  Most of all, it is also interspersed with such lyricism and universal truths.  Buddha's Dog &...

This creative non-fiction piece of mine was published by Flagler Review in 2013 https://issuu.com/bthompson73/docs/flare_fall_2013/85 I Perhaps between heaven and hell typifies an experience outside the pain of childbirth, beyond the anguish of loss and the perpetuity of the arctic, hospital waiting room—where, like the airport, the masses wait anxiously for their arrivals and departures. Here is what I am writing about now.  A place where someone cannot absolve are the spaces where I cannot let go.  Therefore, ghosts still walk on my paper and step all over my canvas and pull my hair at night and I cannot remember where I stashed my poems—my paintings—destroyed in my brother's basement during one rainy season that I have not been able to hold a mordant gaze upon an original idea.  Assuredly, I told my brother, John, that if I die now, I would like him to oversee my writing and artwork.  I can see it in his expression—who the hell do you think yo...