Madame Bovary – Catherine Hamrick

On Writing: The Power of the Exact Word

quote about using the right word by Mark Twain provided by chamrickwriter with images of lightning bug under glass and streaks of lightning

The literary world attributes le mot juste, or “the exact word,” to 19th-century author Gustave Flaubert: “All talent for writing consists, after all, of nothing more than choosing words. It’s precision that gives writing power.” Beyond this pointed sentence, the author dropped plenty of good lines about style: “Style is as much under […]

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

My Other Blog: Random Storyteller

The Shadow of My Father’s Beard

It’s the small things, After a person is gone, That keep him alive, For a time, The things unnoticed Until they rise Out of memory’s grave. My father’s beard, Always a shadow, Even at 5 a.m., Briefly bristled my cheek, While my mother Lilted, “Rise and shine,” In the dark Of day number four […]

My Father on D-Day: Why Do You Ask This?

They made movies of our memories,

Of what they thought they were:

German mortar and exploding artillery,

The strewn wreckage

Of flipped, ripped jeeps,

Of wire,

Of bodies, whole, some with faces yet,

Of twitching pieces, arms here and legs flung there,

Of middle parts, spilling guts, oozing.

What was I thinking?

The sea foams, so does blood.

Then my hands did the thinking, and doing, on semi-automatic,

What the doctor ordered:

Stanch bleeding,

Apply dressings,

Sprinkle sulfa powder,

The lone wound antiseptic.

And dwindle the morphine—

On who has the best chance?

The hands became the machine

That patched the broken living and passed them to other hands

That stretchered them up the ramp.

To My Mother: Origami Storm

Although I previously published a version of this poem, I revised it with a certain precision—in keeping with my mom’s handiwork. A science major turned homemaker, she lived joyfully and creatively. I opened cereal boxes upside down And absently stuck them on a fridge shelf, Defying the precision strokes of my mom, The domestic engineer […]