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…
Every once in awhile (more often if you’re a diligent reader) you dig into a body of poetry you’ve always known was there, but not really looked at. You had no idea it held such riches. As I awoke today with a heavy sense of loss because of my dog’s death, I saw an article about poet Gregory Orr, read some poems, and remembered why I urgently need to get one of his books. If…
All the ways the small press world sustain literature are on my mind today! As I work to complete my own poetry book manuscript, and read the Poetry Month daily poems of friends, I’m so grateful to be a poet among poets. Tupelo Press has come up with a unique way to help sustain their work, in the 30/30 Project. A poem a day each month from nine poets. This May, my friend Alan Kleiman,…
Nissa in Rachel’s Arms I was invited by Kaaren Kitchell and Richard Beban to submit for their ParisPlay site’s annual “Sensual Surprise” Surrealist Café, so I sent a poem about kisses. Not just any kisses, a very special kind — doggie kisses. Before my beautiful Silky Terrier Nissa died, about a year ago I wrote the poem about the way she liked to bestow kisses as a form of language. In honor of Nissa, it’s…