Jardine Libaire
I'm a fiend for books, bookstores, lit journals, found poetry, libraries, graffiti, artist books, diaries, screenplays---anything that tells a story. My MFA is from Michigan, which is a dearly beloved program. For the last ten years, I've been living in Austin, TX, a city that is very sweet + kind to artists ;) Over the decades, I've worked as a motel chambermaid, real estate agent, dishwasher, bartender, assistant to a perfume designer, art model, copywriter, grantwriter, and restaurant manager. I worship at the feet of Willa Cather. Every Thursday evening, I facilitate a storytelling class at the Lockhart Women's Prison here in Texas, and I've learned more about life from the women in the class than I have taught them, I'm quite sure. Right now I'm working on a new book about a cheetah and a deaf teenager.
William S. Burroughs said: 'Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.' And Dolly Parton said: 'I would never stoop so low as to be fashionable.' And Oscar Wilde said: 'It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.' I love them all! xo
“But in this life we take turns at being enchanting, then enchanted. First we play in the streets, unaware of the freedom burning in the sun on our hair and the cigarette in our mouth, unconscious of the daydreams we inspire. Then it's our time to sit at a window and watch, and we are moved.”
“New Year's Eve. It's a promise of a night. Single, married or widowed, in love, loveless or lovelorn, we all leave our apartments and pick through snow in high heels, or descend subway stairs in tuxedos, lured to wherever we're going--whether we know it or not, would deny it or not--by the kiss of a stranger.”
“My heart perceived wildernesses of contradictions and impossible truths and mystical lies.”
“She didn't tell me how to live, and I didn't tell her how to die. We let sleeping dogs lie.”
“The stuff that changes your life is never very dramatic. You know? Not to other people.”
“Outside my window, truckers trucked, hookers fucked, cops cruised, kids smoked, elders yelled, invalids slept, spouses fought, lovers kissed, while I watched a pussycat playing with stars in a black room.”
“So many land mines in this new territory called adulthood. Talent has a window. Freedom sometimes becomes a trap. We may die before we finish our dreams. Acutally, that we die is a pretty big surprise by itself. We can't spend innocence without accounting. Relationships are contracts. We partner not just for love but because we become too weak to make it alone.”
“I now doubted myself. Innocencce was finite and could not be regenerated. Like spinal fluid. I knew this because I had run out.”
“It's amazing how a certain time in your life can seem to be a prelude, but when you look back, you realize it was a whole work, with a beginning, middle, and end.”
“She'd half loved men, and they'd half failed her.”
“I stood in my own field, wanting obligations to fall from me. This is one way of contemplating suicide, yet it's the exact opposite: what I wanted was to be alive, to escape all the damage, to shed it like snakeskin, to emerge pure and naked and laughing.”
“Isn't it crazy how anger sometimes feels like joy? Just a crash of blood through your heart.”
“Fucking, drinking, smoking, loving, living, freebasing, spending, laughing, crying, working, falling apart, kissing, writing, blacking out.”
“I didn't know the exact trajectory of my breakdown, but I did know that I'd become weak, holding onto wildness, cherishing the idea of it the way you blow a dying fire.”
“But one day, the things that make you free start to keep you down.”