Mary Carroll-Hackett's Blog, page 38

Daily Prompt Love <3 What Emerges

6 February 2018

Thinking a lot today about how the new emerges from the old. 

Go back to an old piece of writing, and use the last line of that as the first line of something new. 

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Guest Blog at Streetlight Mag

Grateful to the good folks at Streetlight Magazine for the invitation to guest blog  

Thinking on Art & Activism. Check it out Here

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Daily Prompt Catch-Up! 3 New Prompts!

3 February 2018

Make art about visiting family.

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4 February 2018

Make art about driving in the rain.

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5 February 2018

Sometimes, limitations can inspire and surprise.

Write a poem limited to six lines, or a story of no more than six sentences.

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Friday Call for Submissions Love

Nebo: A Literary Journal

“Calling all poets, fiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, graphic novelists, and visual artists!

Please consider submittingyour work to Nebo: A Literary Journal, Arkansas Tech University’s literary journal. Nebo has been publishing quality work for 45 years and has published writers from all over the world.

Nebo accepts submissions year round. We’re interested in all kinds of creative work—fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, comics, art, etc. 

Send your submissions as an attachment to neboATatuDOTedu.

Please include a brief, 3rd person author bio of no more than 100 words. 

Simultaneous submissions and multiple submissions are fine. Please let us know if your work gets accepted for publication elsewhere.

We are also happy to consider reprints from print journals. Please let us know where the piece was published previously.

Submissions should include no more than 5,000 words of prose, five poems, or 20 pages of comics.” 

Submit Here

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Home as Inhabitation

2 February 2018

“Home is how we inhabit the world.”-Louisa Thomsen Brits

Make art inspired by this quote. 

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Ancestral Traditions

1 February 2018

“Celebrating Imbolc, the day of the Celtic goddess Brigid that marks the beginning of spring.

Imbolc, also known as the Feast of Brigid, celebrates the arrival of longer, warmer days and the early signs of spring on February 1.

It is one of the four major “fire” festivals (quarter days, referred to in Irish mythology from medieval Irish texts. The other three festivals on the old Irish calendar are Beltane, Lughnasadh, and Samhain – Halloween).

The word Imbolc means literally “in the belly” in the old Irish Neolithic language, referring to the pregnancy of ewes.

St. Brigid is the patron saint of babies, blacksmiths, boatmen, cattle farmers, children whose parents are not married, children whose mothers are mistreated by the children’s fathers, Clan Douglas, dairymaids, dairy workers, fugitives, Ireland, Leinster, mariners, midwives, milkmaids, nuns, poets, the poor, poultry farmers, poultry raisers, printing presses, sailors, scholars, travelers, and watermen. Here’s a busy saint!

One folk tradition that continues in some homes on St. Brigid’s Day (or Imbolc) is that of the Brigid’s Bed. The girls and young unmarried women of the household or village create a corn dolly to represent Brigid, called the Brideog (“little Brigid” or “young Brigid”), adorning it with ribbons and baubles like shells or stones. They make a bed for the Brideog to lie in…..” (from Irish Central)

Read more traditional ways of celebrating Imbolc, St. Brigid’s Day, here

Make art about ancestral traditions. 

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Respect

31 January 2018

Make art about daily actions that show respect for others, about tolerance, about countering divisiveness. 

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Daily Prompt Love <3 What the Body Demands

30 January 2018

Make art about a time your body demanded to be heard. 

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Monday Must Read! Everything Here Is Beautiful by Mira T. Lee

Thanks and Love to my fierce beautiful cousin, Sherrie McGimsey, for pointing me to this amazing read. Our country’s failure to properly provide services and safety for our brothers and sisters with Serious Mental Illness is a failure to the families who love them as well. They are all our children. 

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Mira T. Lee‘s debut novel, Everything Here is Beautiful, was selected by the American Booksellers Association as one of Winter/Spring 2018’s Top 10 Debut titles. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as the Southern Review, the Gettysburg Review, the Missouri Review, Triquarterly, Harvard Review, and American Short Fiction, and has twice received special mention for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the Peden Prize for Best Short Story byThe Missouri Review (2010), and an Artist’s Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council (2012).

From Ms. Lee’s website: 

everything here is beautiful

Two sisters: Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister’s protector; Lucia, the vibrant, headstrong, unconventional one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts to hear voices, it’s Miranda who must fight for the help her sister needs — even as Lucia refuses to be defined by any doctor’s diagnosis. Determined, impetuous, she plows ahead, marrying a big-hearted Israeli only to leave him, suddenly, to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant. She will move with her new family to Ecuador, but the bitter constant remains: she cannot escape her own mental illness. Lucia lives life on a grand scale, until inevitably, she crashes to earth. And then Miranda must decide, again, whether or not to step in — but this time, Lucia may not want to be saved. The bonds of sisterly devotion stretch across oceans, but what does it take to break them?

Told from alternating perspectives, Everything Here Is Beautiful is, at its core, a heart-wrenching family drama about relationships and tough choices — how much we’re willing to sacrifice for the ones we love, and when it’s time to let go and save ourselves. 

From Pamela Dorman Books (Viking Penguin), January 2018. 

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from Kirkus Reviews

The tumult of loving someone with a chronic mental illness can exhaust even the most caring person.

Just ask Miranda, elder sister to Lucia, a brash, brilliant journalist whose periodic descent into severe psychosis has taxed their relationship and forced Miranda to confront the limits of family loyalty. Of course, she knows that Lucia can be attentive, charming, and kind, drawing in friends and colleagues—at least until the inevitable delusions take hold. It’s scary stuff. To Lee’s credit, Lucia, the more compellingly drawn of the two siblings, never seems like a psychological case study. Instead, we get inside her head—perhaps even inside her soul—to grapple with the challenges she faces. Her loving first marriage, to an older Israeli East Village shop owner named Yonah, begins and ends abruptly, revealing the magnitude of Lucia’s impetuous nature. Later, she hooks up with Manuel, an undocumented Ecuadoran immigrant working odd jobs in Westchester Country, New York, and has a baby. A move to Ecuador, where Lucia, Manuel, and baby Esperanza live in close proximity to Manuel’s family, is both comforting and stifling and raises questions about the cultural assumptions governing gender, parenting, and assimilation. In addition, what it means to live outside one’s country of origin is explored from both Manuel’s and Lucia’s perspectives. The book also exposes the helplessness of family members wishing to fix a fraught situation; the class dimension of health care delivery; and the rampant misinformation surrounding the treatment and diagnosis of illnesses like schizoaffective disorder. Lastly, vivid descriptions of the gentrifying Lower East Side of 1990s New York City, the heavily immigrant towns along the Hudson River, and several communities in Ecuador ground the characters in distinct locations.

An evocative and beautifully written debut.

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Buy this beautiful, necessary book

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Between Dreaming & Waking

29 January 2018

Make art about where the threshold between dreaming life and waking life, or about the merging of the two. 

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