Monthly Archives: July 2011

Thursday Poem Share

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Time for Thursday Poem Share and I actually have NOTHING to share with you this week! I’ve been reading and writing journals but apparently I’m still in a poem valley, waiting for a new muse mountain to rise up (and/or climb. Sometimes when pulling metaphors out of thin air you wonder how best to use them . . . ) I don’t even have anything recently rejected that I can revise and share with you. What a strange place I’m in?

So, instead of poetry or even non-fiction I’m going to self-publish my last pending fiction piece titled The Girl Who Cried Wolf in case you just really want something of mine to comment on. But, really, I like to think of Thursday Poem Share (or whatever it will be called in the next few weeks) as more of a place for us all just to share what we have been working on and/or reading.

So do you have something you want to post and/or link to in comments to discuss? As always I’ll take down any work that you post directly in comments this time next week :)

Let’s share!

ID

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After spending two weeks of my summer (two terrific weeks!) with teachers who deal with children/teens in their earlier development, I found myself thinking more about how we build our identities. This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, but whenever you start focusing on something like that everything around you starts to speak to it so I’m going to share some diverse links that have come together recently for me regarding identity.

A few days ago I finished watching a documentary called Last Train Home via Netflix. This documentary traces a family where the mother and father live away from home for all but about a week at New Year in a textile factory. A grandmother raises the children one of whom is a female teen. You think that the film is going to be about the parents but it many ways it is more about the daughter how she represents the next generation of Chinese workers. Even those who grew up in the rural areas (as you see more of in the other documentary I finished Up the Yangtze) still know enough about the “outside world” to want something more out of life then simply doing what their parents have told them. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t feel that drive, at least a little, to rebel? To be free? To be independent? To have their own identity?

The daughter in Up the Yangtze is a bit more timid, but you can still see that craving for  . . . something. In her case, she wants more of an education but without money she can not have that. I came away really wondering what will happen to her? Will her life working on a cruise ship at the age of 16 be her life?

I have a hard time deciding if I should say I grew up poor, dysfunctional etc because my extremes are still no where near what others have experienced, but is all relative isn’t it? I’ve written several different things thinking about my own past (and not just in my poetry!), but I thought I’d share a personal essay today that tries to ponder why/when I decided Math Sucked. Why is my identity built, at least in part, around my inability to convert fractions to decimals and back again?

Perhaps this is a good writing prompt for you today: is there some part of your identity, some name you give yourself (writer, mother, daughter, religious person etc) that you can tell the story of?

See you tomorrow for Thursday poem share!

Review: Design

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And so the Goodreades cross over reviews will continue! I almost saved this for tomorrow’s poem share, but I raise a question at the end of the review that I thought would be good for discussion today. Speaking of poem share still being on tomorrow, at least for this week, I need to write something for it!

Design
Design by Sally Keith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is hard book for me to even consider rating and reviewing because, full disclosure, Sally was one of my favorite MFA teachers.

That being said, I was torn between rating this book as a 4 or 5 because it is a hard book. I don’t mean necessarily hard material or even words that perhaps you won’t understand, but these are complex poems.

Reading a poet (or other type of writer) who doesn’t write like you do, however, can be an insightful and important step in your study of poetry. I could never dream of writing like Sally and I shouldn’t. We have very, very different styles. Yet, there were poems in this collection that I went back and read multiple times because certain lines would just catch me. Sally’s poems have a unique way of speaking and seeing the world.

My favorite poems are probably the series that are each titled Note and then a specific date (without year). In “Note: 03 January” Keith writes, “Air / molecules, rind-like, hold / hollowed yellow glare.” Come on? That is just brilliantly dense.

I’m glad I took the time to read this award winning book, but the one question I find myself raising is: would I have stuck with it if I did not know the author since the poems are so dense?

Hmmm

View all my reviews

My Debut

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This Thursday will be the final Concord Writers Night Out that I’ll be helping to host although I’m still trying to finalize who is taking over. That being said, this Thursday from 5-7 come chat with writers and then 7 enjoy the open mike. This open mike will be a fundraiser for Japan relief. I’ll have books with me, and a portion of any sales I make will go to this event as well. Actually, if anyone purchases books from me before Wednesday, then I’ll donate a portion of those sales to the fundraiser as well!

Speaking of events, this weekend will be my second NC Writer’s Conference. This year it is in Asheville. Last year I went as a guest and this year I am a member. I’m looking forward to hanging out with writers for the weekend. Around the event last year, I wrote a reflective essay that I am going to now self-publish and share via Google docs because, while I did send it to a few magazines, it never found a home. Instead, you are now its home! The piece is titled My Debut 

Because I will be in Asheville I won’t be able to attend the final reading/open mike at Green Rice Art Gallery in Charlotte on Friday at 7. It is the final one in that location because the Gallery is up for sale. It is always a fun event so head out there if you are in the area!

Know of any events in your area you want to mention? Or online events? I’d like to host a hangout sometime in Google + circles. Anyone interested?

I have a lot of personal smaller events/to do’s that will keep me a bit busy this week, especially given that the new semester starts on 8-15 and my online class finishes Wednesday! Hopefully, I’ll still have time to stop by here to post, comment and chat. And also there is a lot of hope behind a week where I have’t written a poem . . . hmm let’s get on that :)

 

 

A Review and Other Odds and Ends

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I’m starting to write more reviews, but really on an informal basis. I used to write reviews for Amazon, but – as with YouTube – you’d run into people who would anonymous rate your reviews as low etc and I got tired of that. Goodreads (if you don’t realize how much I LOVE Goodreads, then have you been following this blog for long?) allows me to rate and write a review there that will then connect directly to this blog as a draft. The one at the bottom of this post is the first I have attempted. I’ve also connected my Facebook and Twitter accounts so we shall see how that goes!

Speaking of trying new things, I’ve decided to change my social bookmarking tool over to Diigo instead of Delicious.  I haven’t played around with it as much as Delicious, but I’m intrigued. I’m not completely sure about it, but since I am part of a network group over there, it might be easier to have everything in one place :)

Also in things I’m adding, I made a Google + page for Referential and I’m trying to make a final decision about which Yoga place I want to be a member of because I really want to have a regular practice. y2 Yoga is a little bit of a drive for me, but is currently the front runner because 1 – they had great energy 2 – they have showers :)

In short, for all of this, I am always trying to “improve” but streamline at the same time. There are many things I’ve cut back, while adding in the stuff that I think will serve me best in the long run.

As a 9 year old me once wrote:

You plan to do that
You plan to do this
The longer you wait
The more you miss

Have a great weekend!

The Road

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why bother reviewing, commenting on a book that is already so popular and famous? Well, I just wanted to note a few thoughts because I did find the book to be engrossing. I often read 10 pages here in a book, pick up another etc, but I felt compelled to read this book in long sessions even though the language was so rich I often found myself stopping to re-read whole paragraphs just because the wording was so beautiful.

This isn’t a novel of surprises. This is truly a book where the journey is the point more so than the destination.

Here is an example of some of the writing: Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland.

If you are a fan (interested) in dystopian novels than this is definitely one I’d recommend.

View all my reviews

Thursday Poem Share

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And, we are back! For one of the last Thursday poem shares . . . don’t worry though because it will be moved to either Wednesday or Friday!

First up I want to share a poem I read via my Poetry Daily app on my iPhone. Great feature! And free.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, Chef E and Vox Annmarie helped me to make a short poetry vid for my upcoming chapbook release. Some of the audio is a little quieter than others so feel free to crank it up!

You can read the text of the poem by clicking HERE. Pre-orders will be starting soon but I do have a few author copies. What will I do with them! Well the lovely blurbists (Helen Losse and Scott Owens) will be receiving copies soon and then I’m sending both of my sisters copies because they don’t even know it yet but they are in the dedication :) That leaves 3 copies . . .

I’m going to share a really new poem with you today. I typed it up maybe yesterday and I think I hand wrote it on Monday.

poem is off to be revised!

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As always feel free to comment on what I’m working on and/or to post your own work for comments. I’ll take them down a week later.

I’m also working on typing up quotes from my quote notebook so I can have an electronic version because I like using them for writing prompts so why don’t I borrow one.

Write to find out what it is that you know. -Margaret Gibson

I hope everyone is continuing to have a great week!

Mosaic

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I thought I’d talk a little bit about fiction today, but I have to make it quick! Like flash fiction. Which is pretty much all I tend to write in the fiction world…

First up I wanted to share a really great blog post by Robert Brewer titled Is Writing Worth Pursuing. Join the discussion here or there.

I write prose (hit or miss) with an eye towards publication. I prefer to blog and do things informally with prose so I’ve decided to start posting more of it to the blog etc.

I did, however, envision (for a time) that I would write a mosaic novel. That I would piece together short vignettes into a larger story. It was a fun experiment that got as far as about 6000 words and about 20 pieces of writing, but I don’t feel the drive to tell that story anymore so the pieces I want to keep I’m going to share with you in case you haven’t seen them yet.

The project was potentially titled “The Digs” and the first piece was Practicing Disaster which appeared online in “The Dead Mule.” Following along with the story is Braking which appeared in “Pif Magazine.” Then I re-purposed an older piece that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a story or a poem titled Bound which appeared in Metazen. Then the final piece that I decided to keep will be self-published in Google docs. It is titled Needy.

Can you see how the pieces connect? Do they not? What do you think of trying to write small pieces to connect together instead of just writing a straight novel?

This is a topic just to chat about. To fiction! Which often inspires me to write poems :)

PS – on a side note I have updated a Google + account for Referential and my Skype account. Check side bars on the various pages to see….