Thanks to Poetry Editor Jennifer Finstrom for selecting my poem “My Wishing Star on a Long Ride” for Eclectica’s July/August 2015 Issue. Summer is often a time to remember childhood, and the poem centers on my memory of a month of horsebackriding at Hunewill’s Dude Ranch. The memory is as starry as the night sky seen from our cabin door. My mother, brother, and I rode the same huge, gentle Morgan horses every day, learning…
Even if you’re the rocket scientist’s daughter, growing up in a fishing community gives you an early acquaintance with two immutable forces: the ocean and death. One of my grammar school friends had a father who fished on the tuna fleet. One season, he just didn’t come back. In a restaurant in San Pedro, you can see photos that show why this wasn’t a rare occurrence. The tuna boats in the 1950 were low-slung, and…
If you’re an aspiring novelist who has put in the good work on learning your craft, and now wants to proceed to the getting publishing part, I hope you, too, read scores of books, articles, and blogs about the publishing industry. (The MUST-READ on this topic: The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published from The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry.) After giving myself a basic pub-biz education, hiring my editor, Arielle…
I’m engaged with Dickinson through her letters and poems in a kind of long, late-night girls-sitting-up-and-braiding-each-other’s-hair kind of conversation. I can’t read anything she’s written without wanting to talk back. She inspires the opposite of passivity! She makes me think and feel so much, and she connects so well with what’s been going on inside me, those ineluctable currents of being that need closer and more passionate examination before they slip away into other currents.…
I do some of my best writing in the shower. In my mind, of course. Neither pen nor phone can withstand the water. The inspirational quality of the shower may be in part because mine has a skylight. I can wash or just do hyrotherapy in sunlight, watching clouds drift overhead, or listening to rain on the glass. Whatever it is, washing naked in sunlight has to be one of the best pleasures ever invented.…
Time Travel Devices – Is It Fantasy or Sci-Fi? Time travel novels span many literary genres. You can find them in science fiction, fantasy, literary, and romance categories on Amazon. Between H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series lies a vast continent of stories of moving backwards and forwards in time. Often, the category depends on the mechanism for time traveling. If it’s mechanical, it generally conforms to science fiction. If it’s…
Thinking about being a rocket kid today, growing up in the mushroom shadow of the Cold War and with my father, the bipolar rocket scientist. He used to joke that he blew up rockets for a living. He blew up families, too. But he also created some fantastic art, taught me how to fish and how to be creative, and I still miss the pain-in-the-family factor of his explosive, active, restless, engaging, irritating, fascinating personality.…
While I was appalled to learned about a gender difference in the way women and men submit their writing for publication, as I read Kelli Russell Agodon‘s essay on the subject, I increasingly recognized my own female style of sending out my work. Women poets, read this essay on the differences, and see if it rings any bells. She is the author of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room and was the co-editor of Crab…
Einstein was right: time isn’t real. I know because I’ve fallen into the black hole between finishing my novel, The Renaissance Club, and waiting for an agent to offer to represent it. A seemingly endless span in which “Replies if interested” is the new “No, thanks.”It’s been two months and many queries. I’m growing anxious, which is not a help to a writer. So what to do while waiting so impatiently? I’ve read many articles…
When you spend most of your life in midair, how do you travel through time differently than someone does when spending your time seated among a throng of thoughts? Most of my days and nights are spent sitting and thinking. It must look like an odd life to a hummingbird. Like a sloth of some upright kind. But I think time moves faster for me than the hummingbird, who dives to the feeder and pokes…