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Ksenia Anske

November 23, 2014

On stage with Amanda Palmer

by Ksenia Anske


Photo by German City Girl

Photo by German City Girl

Photo by German City Girl

Photo by German City Girl

Ron Vitale asked: "I'd love to look into your mind and see how being on stage went, your fears and how you pushed through."  

As you all know, last week darling Amanda Palmer stayed at my house and allowed me to feed her borscht and vodka, and then the next day we went for a walk in the morning, played chess, had lunch, and in the evening got on stage at Seattle's Town Hall. Amanda sang her beautiful songs, and talked about her beautiful book THE ART OF ASKING, and sang again, and invited Jason Webley to come up. He sang songs too. He is so good at it. They both are. And I sat in the first row, fidgeting, waiting for my turn to come up and, hopefully, lend my hand to entertaining the audience. I was dressed in ballet attire--tutu, ballet tights, leotard and everything--because Amanda asked me to. She asked me to be her guest, a writer in a tutu.

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TAGS: Amanda Palmer, Jason Webley, stage, performing, reading, reading aloud


June 21, 2014

Vary the rhythm of your sentences

by Ksenia Anske


Photo by Joel Robison 

Photo by Joel Robison 

Photo by Joel Robison 

Photo by Joel Robison 

Rhythm. We all love rhythm. Music. Beat. Songs. Speech. I guess it comes from the womb. From the heart. The heartbeat we've heard, before born, it was rhythmic, is rhythmic. Comfortable. Soothing. Or exciting. Or maybe it's the sound of life itself, and we love listening to it, to know that we're alive. I'm not the first one to say it, and you've probably heard it a lot. Have read about it, thought about it, seen it in books, in your own writing. There is a certain rhythm to every piece of writing. Think poetry. Poetry is where its loudest. But in prose it's there, too. Think about your favorite book, open it, look at the sentences. Don't read them, simply look at them. At their length. At their structure. Every comma is a beat, every segment of a sentence is saying something, sounding something out. Every period is a louder beat, a stop, a pause. I'm not a musician, so I don't know proper terms. You know what I mean, though. See how no one sentence is alike? See how each new sentence picks up the rhythm and changes it into something new? See how when there is repetition, it only goes on for 2, 3, 4 beats, rarely more, because otherwise you will get tired as a reader and start perceiving it as a list?

It struck me this week (yeah, yeah, I know, things tend to strike me, laugh now.)

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TAGS: rhythm, music, tempo, sentence, writing, reading aloud, variety