Write Like a Kid I have the two latest California Poets in the Schools anthologies on my desk: If the Sky Was My Heart (2014) and Sing to the Heart of the Forest (2013). The more I read them, the more I understand why I read them, […]
Happy 2015! I wish all of you a prosperous and creative New Year. Thanks also to everyone who takes the time to read this blog. Let’s kick off January with a post about writing book reviews. The Art of the Review In the Sunday, December 28, […]
This is the final post for 2014. I’ll be back in January with musings on Shakespeare, why I’m a sucker for kids’ poetry, the pros and cons of daily practice, prose vs. poetry, writing reviews, basking in obscurity, and other observations from the writing life. Thirteen […]
Step Up to the Open Mike Everyone in the café heard me clear my throat into the microphone, my “hello” startling me through the loudspeaker. Fifteen years old and wearing a dress I’d made from an Indian bedspread, I delivered a quavering version of “Cameroon,” my favorite […]
The Black Dogs of Rejection Thomas Mann said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” We writers sweat over every sentence, agonize, rewrite, and rewrite some more. When we finally get a piece of writing ready […]
Alina as a young reader, lost in a book I’m happy to have Young Adult author Alina Sayre as my guest on today’s post. I met Alina at Village House of Books in Los Gatos last spring during California Bookstore Day. Her spirit and enthusiasm were infectious, as […]
My Father the Teacher Recently, my mother sent me a poem I wrote at the age of six on a sheet of mimeograph paper. I turned the poem over and saw that I’d written it on the back of a copy of my father’s 1967 teaching schedule from […]
The following is reprinted from my book Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets, PushPen Press 2014. Deep Images Years ago, I was a student in a drawing class trying to draw a tree. My teacher came by and said, “What you’ve drawn is your idea of a tree. […]
“Writers often talk about the books that influenced them, but what are your nonliterary influences?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/as-a-writer-what-influences-you-other-than-books.html?ref=review&_r=0 – Bookends, NYTimes, Sunday 11/9/14 Thomas Mallon and James Parker answer the question in two short essays. Mallon writes that he keeps “photos around me while I write the way other authors keep […]
Being Present I recently watched The Artist is Present, a documentary about Marina Abramović. Abramović is known as the “grandmother of performance art.” She has cut and burned herself, ingested anti-psychotic drugs, and invited people to manipulate her body with a variety of objects, including “a rose, a […]
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