Author Archives

Erica Goss, Poet

Erica Goss is a poet, writer and instructor. She served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016.

The Danger of Notebooks

“A journal always conceals vastly more than it reveals.” – Verlyn Klinkenborg, The Rural Life In “Notes on the Danger of Notebooks,” an essay in Synthesizing Gravity, Kay Ryan writes, “Isn’t it odd to think that in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention […]

Sticks & Stones: The Fourth Year

Here’s to another year of celebrating poetry! Each book I reviewed in 2021 was a tremendous gift. As we endured a second pandemic year, poets wrote about navigating an unquiet and often frightening world, about Nature, humanity, and relationships, about heredity, abuse, and the rewards of long love.  […]

Fear of the Blank Page

The blank page. A rectangle of absence, it fills the writer with equal parts expectation and dread. A stark reminder of the writer’s apartness, it demands that you pay attention to it and not your family, dogs, messy house, or whatever else might distract you.  We could compare […]

Generating New Poems from Freewrites

I’m a dedicated freewriter. I especially like that freewriting has roots in poet Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness, “spontaneous prose,” the Surrealist Movement’s “automatic writing,” and in Yeat’s “trance-writing.” (Check out this videopoem by Helena Postigo, “I Think of Dean Moriarity.”) My first introduction to freewriting was in a college English class in 1980. […]

Words with Pictures: Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis: (meaning “description” in Greek; expanded to mean “the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device.”) Merriam-Webster: a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art I published my first ekphrastic poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of Ekphrasis, […]

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The Sundress Blog

(a publishing collective supplement)

BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

Daily Discussions of craft and the writing life

Richie Billing | Fantasy Writer

Creative Writing Tips And Advice

Dave Bonta

multimedia poet

Erica Goss

Poet, Writer, Instructor

The Urban Orchardist

A Blog by Novella Carpenter

National Day Calendar

Fun, unusual and forgotten designations on our calendar.

A Journey With You

surviving schizophrenia

O Write: Marilynonaroll's Blog

Thoughts on writing and reading

Ferhext

Heather Derr-Smith

Reading in Bed

Reading the classics, CanLit, and everything else. In bed.

Trish Hopkinson

A selfish poet

maybesopoetry

A Poetry & Literature Blog

El Gato News

The Student Newspaper of Los Gatos High School

Danny Gregory

Inspiration for creative folks like you.