Welcome to the New Website!

/6 Comments/in /by

Today is my birthday — a big one, 65. In The Hobbit, on one’s birthday you give gifts to everyone else, so I’m thinking of this post as my gift to you. (Though if you want to drop by and pick up a piece of cake, we can do that, too.)

Here’s the story. I have been sending my mystery novel to agents, and learned that my website needed to be “professional,” so I made some effort, hired a terrific expert to do all the stuff that was beyond my skill set, and here we go. I’m grateful for Priscilla Long‘s creative nonfiction class which required me to get my CV up-to-date. (It took me two years to do that, and even so the dang thing needed more work before it could be posted.) When I flinched from sharing it, Priscilla said that other people would not look at it closely, but that I would have a record, where I could find it, where I couldn’t ignore it, for the rest of my life. So. There it is. (You don’t have to look at it.)

The old blog was scooped up in January, and if you’re missing a few blog posts, my ineptitude (not realizing they wouldn’t ride along) is to blame.

One of those posts was about my intention to submit work — poems, essays, stories, novel — every day for 100 days. I am now 50+ days into this (I started two days after the Biden inauguration). And, yes, I do have news to report:

My creative nonfiction piece, “Doll Eyes” is a feature at Helix Magazine. There’s a whole story behind this — I revised it THE DAY BEFORE IT WAS ACCEPTED and started sending it out as “Doll Stories” (which I like better). Helix, when I suggested that they look at the new version, said, “We like it the way it is,” and they posted it!

I FINALLY have another short story acceptance. This is one of my historical pieces, based on my maternal grandparents’ stories, and I’ve submitted it dozens of times. As with the doll piece, I had decided to revise and cut this (by 500 words! I retitled it!). So it was “out” in both versions, to several places. But Passengers Journal accepted the old version, “Abednego Thornes,” and reported that their editors unanimously voted for it. I’ll let you know when it’s published.

age one, with my dadI’ve had several poems accepted, and just today NVQ’s Issue 8 [Not Very Quiet] with my poem, “A Mask of Water,” went live.

I’ve had a couple poems appear in print publications this year (those do still exist, and I’m grateful), Constellations, and Plainsongs; you can find my recently-published poems on-line at: Boxcar Poetry Review, The Bookends Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Third Wednesday Magazine. The link goes to their blog, but I have a PDF of 3rd Wednesday, which I can forward to you (I have permission) if you contact me; it’s also available in a print edition. Just in case you’re looking for places to submit your splendid poems, I also have one  forthcoming from Clementine Unbound. 

So I’ve submitted about 70 poems multiple times and had 8 accepted? That’s not a bad ratio, and I’m grateful.

A lot of my friends don’t realize that my superpower as a child was to be invisible. Even now I sometimes imagine disappearing, dropping off everyone’s radar, moving to a desert island or a cabin on a creek somewhere. I’d write for the joy of it, for myself. (My brother and sisters would say that I’m already doing this. “Where are you?”) I’d stack all my notebooks up on a shelf and admire them, all by my lonesome. But here I am, well into this journey called life, and my art (not to mention my husband and three daughters) has consistently asked me to step forward and be seen. Yes, it terrifies me. Again and again, my poetry friends and the writing world in general has scooted over and made a place for me. They brought cake.

Thanks for being here with me.

me at age 8, with siblings

 

 

 

Writing the Political Poem

/1 Comment/in /by

“I really do sincerely feel that bewilderment is at the core of every great poem, and in order to be bewildered, you have to be able to wonder. You absolutely have to be permeable to wonder.” –Kaveh Akbar

In November I took a Hugo House class on “writing angry poems,” taught by the poet Sharon Bryan. One of my discoveries was that it is freaking hard for me to express anger. Feel it, yes; turn it loose in a poem: no. So I struggled. “This is like a poem about repressing anger,” was one of the comments I received. Another: “This poem doesn’t seem to be about anger, but maybe mild annoyance.”

One of Bryan’s recommendations was to read Deaf Republic: Poems, by Ilya Kamnisky. I dutifully ordered a copy and have been avoiding it ever since. This week, I read it. It could not have been more timely for me. In the 1960s people used to say, “the personal is political.” Over the last ten days, we have seen how true that still is.

Deaf Republic is profoundly personal. It struck me as being less a collection of poems than one poem, or a play-in-verse perhaps. Tracy K. Smith writes that what she finds here is “conscience, terror, silence, and rage made to coexist alongside moments of tenderness, piercing beauty, and emphatic lyricism.” Kaminsky’s story opens when a young, deaf boy is shot down by soldiers in an occupied town, and then it winds through the perspectives of other characters in the town, which is struck deaf by the violence, introducing a couple expecting a child, then Momma Galya, the puppeteer who rescues their infant. But the poems transcend their place of “otherness.” As Smith, who has served as the United States Poet Laureate, continues in her cover blurb: “It hurts to read these poems. It hurts to read them and find the world I belong to stricken by a contagion of silence.”

The first and the last poems stand apart from the rest, and address exactly that: meaning, us. Us as we  watch atrocities, then “pocket our phones” and go to the dentist.

We Lived Happily during the War

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house–

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth moth
of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

This is always our charge. Let us write poems that capture the bewilderment and push through it and call out the truth.

All Poetry, All the Time…

/0 Comments/in /by

Well, maybe not all the time.

Despite–or perhaps because of the nightmare of our country falling in half and over the edge of the possible–I decided yesterday morning that I would 1) draft the final chapter of my second mystery novel (working title: Piano for Beginners), and 2) finish printing out…the…whole…damn…thing.

Early that morning I had told my husband that I was going to. I felt confident that it was all under my control. Then, distractions.

Some of these, I manufactured for myself. (YouTube videos about impeachment. A very important article on the New Yorker website. I suddenly HAD TO HAVE a new lamp. Also, I read an entire–short–novel by Ann Cleeves.) Some distractions, I argued, were actually “on task”: I found myself going back to early chapters and making notes for what has to be added, what might be changed, the cool epigraph that I really must look up and add to the others.

Some distractions dropped in out of the clear blue sky. (My daughter Emma, switched to day shift, dropped by at 3:00 to … just hang out, I guess. A phone call with an old friend. A phone call with a poet friend.)

It’s all good. I can finish tomorrow, I told myself.

After dinner, my husband said, “Did you print it out?”

I explained.

Then, I went to my desk, drafted the final chapter (a shitty first draft, but even so) and printed out the remaining pages.

It felt great.

Today I have choices to make.

  • Do I take a few days off?
  • Should I take a whole month off?
  • What should I do instead while I’m taking this break?

Meanwhile, I started today by reading this great post by Stephen Pressfield. As he always, uncannily, seems to do, he taught me something about my own resistance (I mean, really, I read a whole novel?), alongside offering a major lesson on the world “out there.” I think you should read it, too.

So, after thinking about my own resistance, I decided, yes, take time off (a week).

For a week my morning writing time (at least) will be all poetry, all the time. And instead of continuing my mystery-novel reading binge, I admit, I’m also planning to reread Sandra Scofield’s The Last Draft.  

But you can expect a poetry blogpost here in the next few days. I promise.

 

My Slow Christmas

/1 Comment/in , , /by

I’ve mentioned before how much difficulty I’ve had getting into the spirit of the season. I know I’m not alone. And I have been “busy.” Aside from obsessing about politics (looking forward to having it all take a back seat–as David Brooks has promised), I have several different writing projects going.

And I’ve been acting “as if“: sending out a massive amount of Christmas cards, sneaking in some shopping and trying to organize gifts for my daughters to pick up at the house. I’ve been negotiating our Boxing Day Zoom for opening gifts (as our youngest daughter is working today and tomorrow). I’ve been hanging out with my old dog. I’ve kept up with my goal to walk 5 miles a day. On the Solstice, given torrential rain, and snow (!), I did almost the entire 5 miles inside the house. (Pabu and I did make it outside for a bit in the early evening–a Tibetan Terrier, he likes snow.)

But now it’s Christmas Eve, and I’m feeling that maybe an Ann Cleeves’s novel and some tea and shortbread are in order. Even if I can’t get the picture to shift.

One of the gifts I splurged on for myself recently was to sign up for BookFox’s “Master Your Writing Time” course. I’m dawdling my way through it, but finding–despite my best efforts, or the opposite–that it has helped. Some of the lessons are action tips, and adopting the Pomodoro method has worked beautifully for me. Sitting for very long makes me feel achy and stiff. But working for just 25 minutes, then spending 5 minutes moving around, doing a few chores (avoiding my phone & computer), has been pretty amazing.

Then I came to his lesson “Hasty Writing vs. Slow Writing.” As a huge fan of Louise DeSalvo, I was already primed for what Matthew Fox called a “mindset” lesson. It ended with a link to the blogpost below.

I’ll still find a way to walk my 5 miles today. But I wish us both a slow Christmas.

A Manifesto for Slow Writing