Category: On Writing

{gratitudinous: a november exercise}

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November 1, 2023

8:27 am

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Contrarily, Mental Health, Musings on Extemporanea, On Writing, Part and Poetry

“so, thanks for this…”

When it finally decides to stop lollygagging, time does not play. September dragged her limp skirts in the dust, and then, record skip, all of a sudden, November, and I’m groping in the dark velvet bag of early evenings and late mornings, desperately fumbling after gratitude.

To paraphrase a line from a TV show, this past summer has been “a bully of a season” which won’t stop trying to step on the back of my shoe, give me wedgies and fling spitballs into my hair. I would really like to hip-check said bully into traffic, but it keeps changing faces, and it keeps coming back. I hear it’s the same with you, in so many tiny, vicious ways.

And yet, there’s gratitude to be found in the dissection of our annoyance, in the intersection of our drowning and our fear. There’s gratitude to be found in the CPR we perform on our souls, restarting our hearts, restoring our breaths. It’s here, in the last bitter draughts of the thing we thought we’d never choke down. It’s here, in the 3AM wakefulness, in the fretful twisting of the soul as we wonder when, where, how we’ll move past this moment. It is here – and thus we will stay here, we’ll stay in the moment. We’ll find it, this gratitude that sometimes eludes us.

Not everything is a grace, not everything is something we can look on with pride, with joy, but this very choice is left to us – and the final choice, the one in which we choose… In the words of Victor Frankl, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” That we have – that is always with us. So, we choose our act, and choose to act, in gratitude.

So thanks for that. For the exercise and the observation. For the necessity and the need, creating the practice. We’ll take it.

{story chat: angie thomas & books of wonder}

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April 13, 2023

12:50 pm

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Author News, Book News, General Coolness, Happenings, Interviews, On Writing, What We Do, Who We Are

A breezy, sunny weekend, good books and avid readers! Looking forward to hanging out in the North Bay this Saturday night!

And, then Sunday afternoon, I’ll be virtually jetting to New York to talk with even more great book people!

I hope you can join me one place or the other – you can definitely still reserve your spot on Crowdcast with Books of Wonder, so if you can, do! If not, there will be recordings and photographs posted from both events, and I’ll tell you all about them later.

Until then…

{pf: Henri on the internet}

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January 20, 2023

10:15 am

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Author News, Book News, Literary Life Observations, On Writing, Poetry Friday, Seven Sisters

Happy Poetry Friday! I’m at Laura’s today, being interviewed about my latest middle grade book – wherein I have the students participate in Poetry Friday.

Poetry Friday is kind of a funny thing for me – because I never was quite sure how I got involved. I did a little bit of posting, and enjoyed writing the odd haiku, but when an actual published picture book poet approached me about being part of a poetry group, I was… shocked, to say the least. And it’s happened twice now! Do I yet consider myself a poet… Not…really? Even though I just wrote a novel that has original poetry of mine (in the voice of my middle grade character) all the way through it. Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to narrow anything down. I’m a writer. I’ll always be a writer. Sometimes, I just write poetry.

To that end, here’s a semi dansa:

So, How Are You…? and Other Question Pitfalls

We say “Good” and mean “Well…”
Polite insists on “fine:”
(If heartsick, give no sign
It’s in poor taste to dwell,
We say.) Good and mean? Well…
While no one’s all sunshine
It just seems asinine
To beam while we’re in hell.
We say “Good” and mean, “Well…”
Are we to “fibs” resigned,
So no one says we whine?
On this point I REBEL —
Say good, and mean it. Well?

Hope you’re happy and you know it this weekend. Or else if you’re grumpy, you don’t tell people you’re doing fine. Poetry Friday today is Marcie Atkins’ blog, where she is ironically featuring one of Laura’s books today too. Happy Weekend.

{welcome, poetry peeps! the roundup is here!}

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August 25, 2022

5:37 am

37 Comments on {welcome, poetry peeps! the roundup is here!}

Musings on Extemporanea, On Writing, Part and Poetry, Poetry Friday, Seven Sisters, What We Do, Who We Are

Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge in the month of September! Here’s the scoop: We’re drawing a form from within our community and doing a Definito. Created by poet Heidi Mordhorst, the definito is a free verse poem of 8-12 lines (aimed at readers 8-12 years old) that highlights wordplay as it demonstrates the meaning of a less common word, which itself always ends the poem. Are you in? Good! You’ve got a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering with the rest of us on September 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals.

Welcome, Poets, to the liminal season, where we are on the threshold of seasons, standing between the last gasp of summer, and the first breath of autumn. The Poetry Sisters’ challenge this month was a good one for a moment of transition, as it was a new-to-us form called the Bop. Created by poet Afaa Michael Weaver, the Bop is a kind of poetic argument, with the first stanza setting up a complaint, the second expanding on it, and the third either providing resolution or a narrative of a failed resolution. You can read Laura‘s poem, Mary Lee’s, Tricia and Liz’s poems here. Michelle K. joins us here. A few more Bops might pop up throughout the weekend, so stay tuned.

For more Poetry Friday offerings, and to share your own click here. Thanks for stopping by.

With my affection for the villanelle and the sestina, you’d think I’d be at ease working with a refrain, but perhaps it was something about a group-sourced refrain (hat tip to Poetry Sister Sara) that tripped me up. For whatever reason, the refrain in the Bop seems wholly separate from the stanzas… so much so, that I ended up hitting a wall at the end of my first stanza. Suddenly the fourteen-syllable lines seemed clunky, and the beats fell oddly. I started over, trimming my lines, but then the rhyme felt forced. Another draft, now completely unrhymed, but the internal rhythm and more polished language of my lines felt off when faced with that casually worded refrain. Isn’t that just the way it goes when you have a poetic form you’re certain will be simple? Eventually I got it to where I was …just done messing with it. I left the rhyme imperfect, with an off-meter step near the end of each stanza to signal that repeated refrain coming to pause the discussion again. Reminding myself these poems are meant to be exercise and not perfection, I stumbled and limped into my imperfectly perfect topic… housekeeping.

Click to enlarge

(Ashes to Ashes, and) Nuts to Dust

Disorder settles like the dust
Drifts into velvet piles
In quiet corners. Laundry Lurks,
disheveled. All the while
Freedom peers in through glass panes
Begrimed by birds. It waves hello….

Let’s kick that can down the road.

“Filthy” is not the kind of word
That tells the tale. There’s no mildew.
The difference between “clean” and “neat”
is miles apart. The follow-through,
Is that perfection never lasts:
A moment’s lapse, and things explode.
Chaos comes roaring, moving fast,
disrupts, dismays, and discommodes…

Let’s kick that can down the road.

Through window streaks you’ll see sunrise
And sunbeams dancing on the air.
A wrinkle will not scandalize
A meadow when you’re walking there.
That cabbage moth’s not judging you,
So, take today, get out and go.

…And kick that can down the road.

Just now, we all have so much to do – classes to start, books to buy, odd socks and lunch dishes to find, dust bunnies to rout, and water bills to pay. I hope we can find a moment to take stock and figure out which cans can be kicked down the road indefinitely – and which cans are absolutely only for right now, and must be cracked open immediately to let the full fizz of life bubble out. Carpe diem, poets. Don’t let that just be a catch phrase, life is way too short. Grab all the joy that you can – and splash it out. Happy Weekend.

(Commenting snafus: Commenting issues are an artifact of a sometimes aggressive spam filter. If your comment seems to vanish, it likely got caught. No worries, I’ll fish it out shortly!)

{whither creativity}

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February 9, 2022

11:43 am

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Essay Musings, Mental Health, On Writing

Every year I find I’m knee-deep in spring or early summer, stuffed with farmer’s market produce and sunny days with no idea how or when I got there. I just look up, and boom – this is my life, squeezing to see if the plums are ripe, filling the bird feeder and their bath, watering, weeding (so. much. weeding), slicing up apples for the deep freeze or the dehydrator and doing The Garden Thing that takes up more of my brain every season. As water restrictions and an earlier and earlier growing season changes traditions, I’m attempting to actually notice things and be more present this time around. It, like everything else with me, is a work in progress.

In the last couple of years I’ve been REALLY privileged to have several projects sell, one after the other. I suddenly went from a pause of about two years between books to having books come out three autumns in a row. In a pandemic. And every book, I discover myself knee-deep in revision or writing in ways to expand and bright forward hidden theme, or listening to audio book artists to give my two cents to my editor, and look up and think – wait, how did I get here? Outside of Julianna Baggott’s seminar that I took with my writing group a few years ago (It’s called Efficient Creativity – and it was truly worth our time), I don’t look much at my process. I have Ideas, they become books, The End.

With a smaller world, fewer opportunities taken to just get out and observe humanity, and more time by myself, though, I’m noticing that my creativity has taken a hit. Not a huge one – but I’m conscious that with the increased monotony of my days that the Random Idea Generator has slowed. I’ve always enjoyed rainy, gray days as a time to cocoon in and dream, but the past two years seem to have provided a plethora of that, and this winter hasn’t been as fruitful as I’ve expected. I find myself floundering. Part of it is the inevitable Doing Anything fatigue with the autoimmune thing, but it’s also that I find myself dodging commitments and feeling enormous pressure when I have to do even small things. It’s funny because we all know we have ‘seasons of life’ blah-blah-blah, but I think I’m finally connecting the dots with the garden – if we don’t have seasons we fertilize, we have seasons where nothing grows.

So, it’s time for finding fertilizer.

It’s a strange place to be. I’m good at creating assignments for this sort of thing – poem idea generators or something – but for ways to generate creativity in general? I’m kind of stumped. I’m trying to make more time to color, daydream, look at clouds. I’m not convinced that won’t work, but it doesn’t seem it will work in a hurry. In the meantime, the trees are budding, and I’m trying to pay attention and be at home in this world. Right now, that has to be enough.

{gratitude: 11:23}

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November 23, 2021

3:15 pm

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On Writing, Part and Poetry

Probably the best and worst thing about having a job writing is that there are so few… constraints. Time constraints, as in when I should show up to the office. Outfit constraints, because who cares what I wear? The only constraint I’m really up against is what I want to and am able to do… but sometimes ability – thanks autoimmune disorder! – is where it falls apart.

After being lectured by my endocrinologist about “you don’t complain enough,” I’m trying to be more… open about bad days, about the times I want to lie on the floor and weep. I wasn’t raised with floor weeping being an… acceptable attitude? So, I don’t do it, I often don’t often even take a painkiller, I just grit my teeth and bear it. Which is, quite frankly, imbecilic. For goodness sake, let’s take chemistry up on its promise to provide better living, no?

better living through…

Science is a magic word:
The Latin ‘scire” means “know.”
Knowledge is a magic that
with work and time will grow.
Science sits with ‘s’ and ‘c’
In words like ‘sick’ and ‘sad,’
And cures the symptoms of a cold
Before it gets too bad.
Shout-out to science, ‘specially
the science of the cell.
Shout-out to skill in germ-defense,
And here’s to getting well.

{poetry peeps challenge: what the ___knows}

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August 17, 2021

9:10 am

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On Writing, Part and Poetry, Seven Sisters

It’s STILL the month of August, simultaneously the longest and shortest month of the year! This month, the Poetry Peeps are writing after the style of Jane Yolen’s eight line, unrhymed poem, “What the Bear Knows,” a poem written in honor of her 400th book, Bear Outside. Poet Joyce Sidman, who started it all, gave us some neat guidelines for thinking and writing through this poem: a.) Choose your subject, b.) think about the overarching Truths relating to your subject, c.) state six of the strongest truths into two stanzas, and d.) find an end rhyme – but you don’t have to. This sounds straightforward, but why do I have a feeling we’re all going to have so many good ideas we’ll trip over at least four of them???

There’s still time! We’re sharing our pieces August 27th on blogs and social media with the tag #PoetryPals. Hope you join the fun!

{#npm: 29 – dissatisfied}

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April 29, 2021

8:47 am

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On Writing, Part and Poetry

Though I am heartened by the Sheenagh Pugh poem to which I linked yesterday, I acknowledge that Ms. Pugh wishes… she could divorce it. She feels she didn’t write it well enough, since some people read it as a piece of joyous and unalloyed optimism. She meant it more as “a good deal of the time things are catastrophically bad, but if only people put in a bit of effort, that can generally change,” but … we human beings can be rather black-and-white, with no shades of gray. And, as writers we know: we don’t get to decide how people read our work. So, let the words gladden you – sometimes nothing goes wrong. Or, let them remind you – usually, everything goes wrong, and we should acknowledge the bare few times they don’t. Words, once you find them, are yours alone… poets or no.

through daily battles
poets aim fearsome weapons
used as paper weights

    

…just don’t forget we make cement out of gravel.

{national poetry month: solus}

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April 1, 2020

2:58 pm

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On Writing, Part and Poetry

Irvington 283

{2020}

a windy Spring day
flings scent of dryer sheets and
last month’s first hindsight

It’s NPM, wherein we celebrate having our way with words. March lasted forever, but someday we’ll look back at it with longing for how good it was, I’m afraid. I’m definitely sticking to haiku this week, as I search for something to say that isn’t… what everyone is saying. I don’t want to make yet another journal of a plague month – but neither do I want to forget everything that’s going on. Instead of chronicling what I’m feeling – which is the same thing everyone is feeling, existential dread – I’m instead going to try very hard to finding something new to see – or a new way to see it – every day. There’s no point promising not to be morose or sad, but I’m encouraging all of us to try and really see things just now – things we should remember.

Something I wrote for a virtual concert our choir is having: It is a paradox that as the pandemic forces us as the world into our separate corners, it highlights the ways in which we are all interconnected. We have all become woven into a tapestry called ‘society’ without even really noticing how our threads cross… and it’s painfully evident how broken we become when we abandon that interdependence and try to live without it. Homeless or homed, rich or poor, infected or well, are all in the same leaking boat. We need to see what it is that put us here, critically examine the leadership that kept it going, and look for a way out – together. Tall order, but, I think, doable.

People have always been walkers in this neighborhood – we have a lot of families who walk as a group – and now they’re circling all hours of the day. Sometimes they chat, and always, we wave, but it’s both uplifting, and heart-twinging. When they’re out of sight, sometimes their voices float back. How we stretch to listen to conversations not our own! I feel like we’ve all turned to ghosts; only our voice carrying proof of life…

Irvington 310

masked

can you see a smile
obscured by a folded mask?
look: my eyes smile back

Poetry Sister Liz is also doing her annual haiku project this month, as is Sister Tricia, Sister Laura, and Poetry Cousin Mary Lee. Don’t miss their original poetry this month.