Erica Goss is a poet, writer and instructor. She served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016.
I’m oddly inspired by parking lots. As I wrote in my book Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets, “Although I’ve written many nature-based poems, I find inspiration in ordinary stretches of asphalt.” Quite a few of my poems began in parking lots – “This is a Wild […]
I was an impatient child. I wanted everything, all the time, right now. Each year before Christmas, my impatience flared into full-blown anxiety, complete with stomach cramps, shallow breathing, and sleepless nights. Once I overheard my mother telling my father, “Christmas is too hard for Erica.” The anticipation […]
In the December 3, 2017 issue of the New York Times Book Review, I read these words from David Orr’s “On Poetry” column: “Poetry, as everyone knows, is unpopular.” The first sentence in an article about children’s poetry, Orr goes on to state that poetry is so unpopular […]
Between July and October, I made four trips by car between Eugene and the Bay Area to promote my poetry collection, Night Court. At approximately 566 miles, this eight-to-nine hour drive was just at my tolerance level. After sitting in the car for what amounted to one working […]
I’m re-launching my online presence, which includes this updated WordPress website, regular blog posts, and an enhanced, twice-monthly newsletter. The newsletter is the result of a brainstorm I had during one of my nine-hour drives between Oregon and California this fall: poetry books need more reviews! I used […]
I finished the last event of my book tour for Night Court, my first poetry collection, on Sunday, October 22 at Skyland Church in the Santa Cruz Mountains. A small, appreciative crowd gathered in the church basement to watch the videos I made from poems in the book, […]
During my October-November trip to Cologne, Germany, I rented a lavender Fiat 500 and left the city for the countryside just east of the Rhine. Called “das Bergische Land” (there used to be a fort there), its rolling hills and fields were a much-needed respite from the crush […]
One day during our most recent family vacation, my son pulled The Exegesis, by Philip K. Dick, off the shelf of a bookstore in Santa Cruz. This strange and visionary book became the unlikely diving board for my latest project, a book based on letters my maternal grandmother […]
Photo by Danny Gregory. Today I’ll talk about why we decided to make our camp just for girls. Media Poetry Studio is designed as a female-only camp. We want the girls in our camp to be center stage, without gender-based competition. According to The Girls Middle School in Palo […]
When I read that high-tech companies in Silicon Valley employ vastly fewer women than men, I felt angry and disappointed, but not surprised. It takes a certain amount of fatalism to survive in a world where inequality is the norm. My fatalism changed to enthusiasm as […]
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