To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.- Emily Dickinson A sense of wonder is the open door to beauty, which can be found everywhere, even in the meanest circumstances. And for most people it’s possible to seek circumstances that allow moments of wonder, even if temporarily and at some cost. Yet it’s so human to close off to those possibilities and circle in the same daily ruts with closed senses…
Though some say time travel isn’t what it used to be. In my novel-in-progress, there’s a lot of debate about what it can and can’t do. But one thing is certain: a jaunt back in time is unforgettable. That’s what members of The Renaissance Club, my college instructor pilgrims to Italy, discover when their art historian tour guide turns out to have a golden pen containing a relic of Francis of Assisi that propels anyone…
I’m delighted to have my poem “You Are So Tired” included in William Ricci’s wonderful spring issue of The Stone Path Review. This one’s for all of us who are running on Friday, month-end, or life-expanded overwhelm, for digging deeper to find the water for the long haul of a creative life. Stone Path has as its mission the pairing of visual and literary arts in “the paths we create and the media we use…
I had a wonderful gig, approaching poets, writers, and publishers to converse in print about their creative process and the literary landscape. For several years, I did interviews for the marvelous Fringe Magazine. And my blog this week, on the closing of the magazine, contains highlights (links) to some of the many interviews I was privileged to conduct. Enjoy! I sure did. Thank you, editor-in-chief Lizzie Stark and poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips, for including…
At selling our books, that is? Anne R. Allen’s blog claims we’re probably doing it all wrong if we’re working book sales through social media in the ways we’ve always been told to do it (for the last 18 months is now always in techno-world). I feel so relaxed after reading her list of all the things I don’t have to do to promote my books. And the few things I do need to do,…
If you’ve been behind as I have in sending your work out for publication, Diane Lockward’s delightful and useful blog Blogalicious has lists (with links) to literary journals that read in summer. Thanks, Diane! I may actually catch up. Except of course for the revising part. I will never catch up with that. Prose poem or flash fiction? The line is fine, maybe there isn’t one. On The Book Baby Blog they refer to it…
My new book, Gods of Water and Air (forthcoming from Kelsay Books), is a mixed bag of poetry, prose, drama, and flash fiction. I like books that incorporate different genres, like letters and narrative, poetry and essays. Japanese haiku poet Basho’s books The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Records of a Travel-Worn Skeleton intrigued me with the readability of a story told through different media all between two covers. Mixing up genres of…
This is one of the best self-critique exercises I’ve ever read, no matter what form you’re writing in, from Bill Roorbach’s wonderful blog, Bad Advice Wednesday:“Here’s a test exercise to invoke as you’re writing a book or story, a play or essay, really anything: flip to any page thereof and declare any paragraph or scene you find there the first paragraph or scene of the work in hand. And read as if it were. Read…
Have you ever seen two jugglers work at keeping the same six or eight balls in the air together? They face each other, but they never look at one another, only at the balls in the air (that’s the whole trick of juggling, keep your eye on the ball). I juggle with the Muse some days, most days. Ideas are the balls in the air, my stock in trade both as a grant writer and…
My new poetry collection, Gods of Water and Air, will be released by Kelsay Books in the fall of this year. A mix of poems, prose poems, essays, and even a short play, it will be an homage to the forces that grew me and sustain me: the ocean’s edge, the people shaped by this landscape, our history, and above all love’s failures and victories. Death’s failure to erase it. It is really a book…