Clara Rose

About me:

Beauties, I've moved to France! The below needs updating, though it's still a lovely read, I feel ...


"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up.” - Chuck Palahniuk (1962- )

A writer--of wine, film, visual arts and music criticism--who recently became a scaled-down country girl in New England. I "extricated myself from the Matrix," as I like to describe it. Born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, I now live in an artists' colony in the Green Mountains of Vermont, where high-altitude breezes tickle ears and thoughts have ample time to roam. In between these extremes were stints in small-town Illinois, a post-collegiate "find yourself" sojourn in Oregon and a lovely apartment off of Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. The latter is where I eventually experimented with the conventional life. That didn't quite work out. (Smiles.)

For a few years after school I was quite lucky and enough of a raging workaholic to support myself purely through freelance writing and editing. The days were syrup. Thick and rich with ideas--alive with a sort of metaphysical sugar. After a while I was offered a job as editor in the general interest department at Publications International, Ltd.--a book publishing house specializing in historical chronicles, Americana and gift books. To keep gears turning at this asphalt-colored hell I imagined myself as a big-time editor at one of the major New York publishers one day--Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins. Maybe that would have happened had I stayed on board, under the florescent lights. But corporate sterility is corporate sterility, and very soon I discovered that these hands need soil and this mind needs pure moments. Again.

So I lassoed both of those. And now I'm happy.

Other tidbits include my lifelong propensity for being surrounded by musicians, from my father to my loves to my friends to my critical subjects. Perhaps you could say I'm rock n' roll without the strumming, but with all the attitude. I act as booking agent for six acts. I am a music promoter; I throw shows. In addition to cultural criticism for various magazines and newspapers, I write poetry, teach a poetry workshop, have been a judge at poetry competitions in three states, edit manuscripts for writers, provide wide-ranging copy needs from ad agencies to folk singers, and really, really enjoy goats.

Also said about me from time to time: unrepentant boho traveler, eater of many French cheeses and occasionally plump blackberries, lover of abandoning oneself to sensation, supreme wino, constant observer, carrier of extreme cultural skepticism and an enraptured addiction to experience with sadly no hope of recovery. Has anyone seen the bridge? I'd really like to know.