Poet, Writer, Instructor
I'm happy to share that my haiku collection, STONE empty chair, has received its first review! I self-published it late last year, and had an enjoyable time selecting the poems, designing the book, and then, of course, receiving the box of copies. I'm also grateful to Serena Agusto-Cox, who runs Savvy Verse & Wit, a… Continue reading STONE empty chair’s first review
In January of this year, I spent four days at a retreat for women entrepreneurs. Located on the Oregon Coast, we were blessed with amazing weather, a lovely beachside house, great food, and each other’s company. I brought my journal, because I always bring it wherever I go. I noticed that most of the other… Continue reading Writing at a Non-Writers’ Retreat
I was reading my Christmas present, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 1956-1963, when I came across a mention of syllabic verse. Plath’s poem “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” is written in stanzas of seven lines, each line containing seven syllables. In a letter to her brother Warren, dated June 11, 1958, she writes about the… Continue reading Syllabic Verse
Two of the books I received for review consideration in 2018 came from poets who live and write in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California: Starshine Road by L.I. Henley, and Waking Life by Cynthia Anderson. Henley writes of growing up in the Mojave, of walking down dirt roads as a child past a house filled… Continue reading The Poetry of Place
In October of this year, my almost-brand-new Instagram account was hacked, starting a long chain of unpleasant events that included stolen passwords, barrages of phishing emails, my inadvertent deleting of my entire hard drive (I got it back, thanks to the Cloud) and weeks of stress and paranoia. At the end of this awful experience,… Continue reading Haiku Book Leads to Hack
In October, I was happily writing a poem about gardening, when it took a sudden turn and revealed its true topic: the calamity of immigrant children held in cages at the US/Mexico Border. That day, I posted “For some reason my nature poems keep turning into political poems” to my Facebook page. In her essay… Continue reading Politics, Theme and Poetry
I recently picked up a copy of Pages, the Creative Guide for Art Journaling & Bookmaking. Illustrated journaling is one of my hobbies, and I was drawn to the project on the magazine’s cover (“mini ZINES create your own!”) At the end of the magazine, I found the article “Gathering Your Story Elements,” by Jeanne… Continue reading Storyboards for Creative Writing
A couple of times a year, I search my submission spreadsheets for poems with the dubious distinction of having collected the most rejections so far. If these poems are not currently under consideration for publication, they go into a special category: Most Rejected Poems.Then I print them out and spread them on the floor of… Continue reading Saving the Most-Rejected Poems
I’m an inveterate recycler. I have a compost pile and six chickens so I can turn food scraps into soil and eggs. I love repurposed items: quilts sewn from old clothes, wind chimes made of bent spoons, collages of torn magazine pages. Therefore, I was delighted to discover that poet Eileen R. Tabios has created a… Continue reading How to Create a Poetry Database
I’ve been so excited about my new poetry project, Field Notes, that I forgot how difficult it is to organize a poetry collection. So far, the 40-odd poems I've assembled fall into the following themes: Tree, Plant, Weather, Flowers, Seed, Insects, Earth, Grass, Compost, Bird, Stone, Ocean, Animal, Desert My first thought was to put the poems into seasonal categories, i.e., Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall.… Continue reading Organizing the Field