Natasha Regehr

Category: Introduction

Home Brew: Vienna in a Cup

Vienna, you very nearly failed me.

I approached you with the same wide-eyed wonder with which I’ve approached the rest of Europe: quivering with anticipation at the thought of having an Authentic Cultural Experience in a city Steeped in History like a well-brewed cup of tea – a classy, temporal tea made of Stately Buildings and the Important People who once inhabited them. Oh, I would imbibe this heady tea, I thought. I would establish a mystical connection with the legendary masters who created the music that has so inspired me all my life. I would enter and inhabit their lofty, artistic world.

Vienna! You tease.

imagesWhat I got instead was a whole lot of kitsch: bewigged men in velvet breeches handing out glossy pamphlets advertising cotton-candy concerts in gaudy palaces; church cantors with nasal voices, leading quartets instead of choirs; museum exhibits with nothing but facsimiles and gift shops; and Strauss. Oh, the Strauss. And not the good kind, either. Waltzen-Strauss. Vienna, you and I both know that there’s more to you than triple time, treble clef trinkets and musical ties. But where to find it?

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Introductions: Pyjama Prose

I am a morning writer.  I like to migrate directly from my bed to my couch, pyjama-clad, to dump my morning thoughts into my mac.

There’s something fluid about a morning mind.  It’s just groggy enough to be unconcerned about the inner naysayer.  It hasn’t entirely separated the events of the night from the events of the day.  Dreams are still a little buoyant.  Words are still a little wiggly, dancing coyly as they wait to be reined in.  It’s a game, this morning prose, an exercise in letting go and urging on.

It’s a shame, then, that most mornings I stumble hazily through my morning routine of eating, washing, and dressing for a day of mundane writerlessness.  I have this outside life, you see, that requires me to deposit myself at specific locations at predetermined times, despite my unwillingness to materialize in public before noon.  Jobs and gym classes are interferences, staving away the freshness of the day and grounding me in socially acceptable self-censorship.  By evening, the words have often wiggled away.

Unless…

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