Vanessa Shields's Blog, page 35

Poem 164 – Believers

believers

the maple tree tops are church after mass
starlings like kids squealing, their bodies frantic with movement
sparrow mothers planning lunch menus, and lazy hours after dishes
feather & fur believers basking in the bliss of communal connection
everything sings

squirrels scamper & scoot
bluejays pull the soft wind on their pointy tails
robins are robust in belly and bellow
leaves quake with the busyness of devotion

the sky is scripture

Poem 163 – Dear poem

Dear poem

I made a choice 
to make us wait to 
roll off the shoulder 
of the morning 
stand tall & face with a smile
the heat-heavy centre of noon
wave as she passes on the wink
of a flirty wind then forward bend
into the belly of the five o’clock hour

& gather our wits in the shower
steam swirls fattening after this
full day of purging & cleaning 
the house & the mind 
pleasure delaying our daily relation
this ink & paper intercourse of
poetic propulsion persisting…

I feel you differently here
in the yawning mouth of eve
inhaling toward night 
soon the dark will tow the moon
over my head & my word play
will tip-toe into dreamland &

you will greet me like a lover’s
tongue on the tip of another 
waking hour & 
I will choose you again
dear poem

Poem 162 – A kind of freedom

A kind of freedom

every day new learnings
a fact on my shoulder
a meaning in my kneecap
a flood of sensory skills attacking my nostrils
this body is a facility for instruction intake
this skin a container for enlightenment

I expand
explore the spectrum of my curious aura
ingest the zest of data’s pulsing wisdom
dabble mingle marinate
in the unknown so foreign becomes
freedom & freedom becomes breathing
to honour the classroom of each glorious day

Poem 161 – Fog

Fog

8am fog lifts my muscles from malaise
I invite the touched down clouds
their moody sway
into my heart’s morning murmurs

we stretch into each other’s landscapes

Poem 160 Debates for Morning run

Debates for Morning run

The great debate begins 
before my limbs
know they are limbs

Should I run? 
No
Should I go for a run?
No
Should I go for a short run? 
Ugh
It’s a gorgeous morning!
Fine!

Then my limbs tingle
anticipation of their use
a muscular aphrodisiac

It’s lift-off the bed
get dressed
brush teeth
ready music & 
run into the day

Shaky with limbic lust
I thrust
my body into the pool post-run
it is a mouth of cold water
gurgling my salty exhaustion

Skinny dip ending
for the joy of naked elation
there is no debate

Yes always yes

Next stop on virtual book tour: Philly!

Writing, reading and discussion with Vanessa Shields, Poet On Demand, and Marshall James Kavanaugh, Dream Poet For Hire

Vanessa and Marshall will discuss writing poetry on demand, and showcasing exactly how they do it! Also, they’ll discuss writing poetry, and will read from their books. Marshall is in Philadelphia.
*MONDAY, JUNE 28, 2021* NEW DATE!
7:30PM EST
Via Instagram Live @dreampoetforhire – Marshall and/or @shieldsvanessa – Vanessa

Thank you to the League of Canadian Poets for a grant for this event!

Poem 159 – restructuring haibun

Restructuring haibun

this body needs an internal 
restructuring of language

its cacophony of voices
bounces off bones
cascades down cells
acts like a bunch of bumptious brats
at a bedtime they deny

how proudly pugnacious
even their malicious ponderings
oh, if only I knew how to sift them
powder them 
blow them away in one
harrowing howl –
worth the affliction of this kind of release

core quest listening
gather ye rose thorns and bleed
honour sounds of joy

Research – Today’s word of the day from Merriam-Webster (I get it in my email every day!) is bumptious: presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive: obtrusive.

Poem 158 – identity haiku & Bruce Meyer Interview Part II

identity haiku

blue ink cuticle
reminder of who I am
shy spiller of words

Interview with Bruce Meyer Part II

VS: You teach writing. What is a facet of writing that you notice many students/writers struggle with? What is your solution/inspiration for this major writing challenge?

BM: The one thing students struggle with is wanting to be easy with what they are writing. They want to toss off rhyme without learning how powerful a tool it is and how connected it is to form. I was a Member of the American New Formalists Movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Their dictum was that one had to be clear (another thing younger writers struggle with) and that the poems should work as much as possible in the voice of everyday speech. There’s a problem that has been pointed out recently called “Poet Speak” where the poet’s voice changes entirely into something unearthly and eerily artificial and fake because they are saying what they think they should say but saying it in poetry. To hear it is unnerving.

The poets I really admire are Philip Larkin, Jared Carter, Ted Kooser, the late Don Domanski, Billy Collins, Marty Gervais, John B, Lee, George Elliott Clarke, Laurence Hutchman, Bruce Hunter and Molly Peacock and Marilyn Hacker because they write poetry that isn’t trying to sound like poetry.

Bruce Meyer

It sounds like someone sharing something important with you. That said, a lot of poets in the 60s and 70s went too far with that and their poems were sloppy. They sounded like someone announcing that a Via Rail train was going to be late on Track 7. There is a happy medium. One of my students who isn’t trying to reinvent language but who is telling something as if it is spoken from the heart is Antonia Facciponte. I’m very proud of her. Her poetry is honest. It isn’t trying to be academic. It is trying to tell the truth of something with passion and urgency yet with an ear for the way we hear life. Giving a voice its basis in the world and not in theory is the other hard thing — the opposite thing — from those poets who don’t know much about the art, don’t want to know much about the art, and who are looking for an easy way out of what they have to say. In other words, the hardest thing to teach students is to listen to themselves, to train their ear, so that they give the poem the kind of honesty that, in the words of Keats, approximates good prose or is a person speaking to a person (as Wordsworth said). When Heaney is on his game he achieves this. I have no use for sound poetry, or poetry that is predicated on linguistic theory. I think Louise Gluck won her Nobel on the basis of being honest and organized with what she is saying. There is beauty in honesty.

VS: How important is your reading life to your writing life? Would you say you’re an avid reader? Do you tend to listen to audiobooks as an option for reading? Do you think it’s the same experience?

BM: Reading is essential. My students ask what they should read. That’s like asking if there is a royal road to learning. Nope. Read everything. A student who only reads one thing is like a deep-sea diver trying to visit the Titanic wreck by holding his breath. They are missing so much. I know that’s an extreme metaphor. Let me put it this way: the practice of poetry is about laying as many tools as possible on your workbench and finding the right tool, the right means of saying something, at the right moment. I have never listened to an audiobook. I mean, why? I have an inner voice. What is important is the way it sounds in my head and not in someone else’s voice.

Reading is democratic. It is individual and it is personal. Christopher Middleton, an English poet I knew, used to say that built into every poem or even a story there is something called the endophone, the innate voice of the author that cannot be taken out of the text no matter how badly someone else reads it.

Bruce Meyer

Here’s an example: Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. You can hear him coughing. “O happy, happy, happy shades… and more happy…” Geez. He’s about to choke up blood. Pity. He is dying on the page in front of you. Writers pour their own voices into their work. You can hear mine. You can hear the emphatic, slightly snarky teacher right now. I am an insistent teacher. I ask students to open their minds, but above all to open their ears. Beyond that, Robert Graves says writers see what they are writing about and you can tell if a writer is near sighted or far sighted. Keats, by the way, was myopic. The essay by Graves is titled “How Poets See.” It is in his book titled The Crowning Privilege.

VS: Is there a place you’ve always dreamed of writing? Like, a specific location… in a villa in Tuscany… or a chateau in France? Where is this place, and what is your dream writing situation? (The script mechanism on my sympatico is a nightmare so sorry for the odd typography. I trust you will fix this problem. Your questions are in bold and my answers in regular font).

BM: There are two things I can do anywhere, sometimes standing up. One is fall asleep. The other is writing. I’ve written in airports, on trains, buses, in noisy restaurants and bars while waiting for service. I have a desk in my living room and a desk in my library in my basement. I keep a lap desk beside my bed (my wife refuses to sleep in the same room because I keep turning on the light and writing things down until I am satisfied with what I’ve done) and write in the middle of the night. I think being somewhere quaint would just distract me. I write about what I see but where I see things is in my mind. I have a very powerful visual memory. I remember details of days, experiences, places, people. I have a lousy sense of time. I experience synesthesia (some people are driven mad by it but I love it because I can taste colors and smell sounds). That is very useful for a writer. I have a poem about my daughter who was eight at the time and learning to play the guitar. They high notes sounded like the taste of lemons. Being somewhere unique doesn’t have anything to do with where someone goes in in their writing. I don’t get to travel much. I’d love to. I’m open to invitations. But not having won a lot of awards, etc. I don’t get invited places. Linares in Mexico generated an entire book in a week. I loved that because Mexico, old Mexico and not the tourist trap Mexico, is like life with the volume cranked up. But the hills of Simcoe County and the view over Nottawasaga Bay means more to me than Tuscany, perhaps because the familiarities are my familiarities. So, I love travel but I can write anywhere. The place where I sit doesn’t make much difference. A river in Hualahuises, Nuevo Leon is just as good as a my desk but with one exception: my desk(s) don’t have fire ants.

VS: How important is time management/writing discipline, and how often does your writing ‘schedule’ shift?

BM: I don’t put myself on a clock. I write everyday. I make the time. Sometimes the time is late at night I’m a terrible nighthawk. The phone doesn’t ring. In the words of Joni Mitchell, “no one calling me up for favors, no one’s future to decide.” If I don’t write everyday, I become physically ill. I think I am an addicted writer. My problem is not making myself write: my problem is knowing when to stop, especially with fiction. I literally walk into the worlds of my stories and sometimes finding my way out takes more time than I realize. I lose track of time. That’s not good. The other day I thought someone was shining their headlights in my living room window until I realized it was the sun and the birds were singing. That is hyper focus and it is bad. It is getting worse as I get older. I slip into my inner eye, ear, and world and time vanishes. There is no time in a text. There is no time in the world of the written word. Everything exists in a permanent now. It is wonderful, but I have to remind myself to leave because I don’t feel pain there (since I was twelve and a kid at school who ended up on the National Ski team broke my back, I’ve been in constant pain, sometimes worse than at other times). Writing is bliss. And I get to meet unusual people in that inner world. Some of the people I encounter are people I have loved and lost and they are alive there and there is no grief, only joy to be with them. Other people such as Mrs. Henderson in “The Hours” are fascinating, as is her gardener. I was sorry when the story was completed. I really enjoyed meeting them. The same is true for the travel writer trapped in his cabin in “Yellow Jack.” We had a lot in common we could have continued to discuss. I think it is important to treat my characters as real people and to show them the same respect, interest, and honor I would show to people on this side of the imagination.

VS: Do you think it’s important for writers to participate in open mics, writing workshops? What can we learn from these experiences?

BM: Only if they are prepared. I once jumped up at an open mic and bombed because the poem wasn’t finished. I tend to shy away from readings these days. I don’t want to put myself between the work and those who are trying to delve into the work. Public reading is taxing. There was a young poet, an idiot, who laughed and made snide remarks all through a set I did at a festival in Durham, and another person, the husband of a poet I respect, who heckled me at a launch for a lit mag in Toronto two years ago. Since then, I have shied away from in-person readings (and not just because of the pandemic). I have fallen in love with the Zoom reading because the moderator shuts off the mic and I can shut off the video feed if someone starts to be an ass. I love recording readings digitally. I love reading with poets such as Marty Gervais or Michael Mirolla or Laurence Hutchman or John B. Lee because I adore hearing their work and sometimes almost forget I should be reading mine. Maybe, at heart, I’m becoming a civilian in the literary world. I just don’t see the need to push my personality into the spotlight. The writing isn’t about me. I want what I write to leave the house and lead its own life. Workshops are different. They are just like my classes, and I love teaching, especially if the participants get what I’m saying as is the case with Antonia Facciponte who has really built on the basics I taught her and has gone off done her own thing which is quite amazing. She is now, very much, her own poet. I don’t have to teacher her now. I get to cheer.

VS: Any final words of wisdom?

BM: I’m not sure wisdom has much to do with it. Live and learn. There is one piece of something I want to pass on, however, that younger writers can use. For years I had been told I ought to write like this poet or that poet. That’s the worst advice to give a young poet. I can teach the engineering of the language and the ways to get the most out of experiences and the imaginative world. But it stops there. I found a quote on a jazz album (I’m a bit jazz fan) from Thelonious Monk. He said, “Play your own way. Don’t play the way people tell you to play. Play your own way, and eventually they’ll catch on even if it takes them twenty or thirty years.” That was back about 1985 I found that quote. I’m still playing but I doubt people have caught on and they may not comprehend what I have done for another fifty. Writing isn’t about the moment. Horace said, “Litera scripta manet,” the written word survives.

When a writer puts something to paper what he or she has said is not just for the moment but for the next five hundred years. I’m prepared to wait and I don’t need to be here when they sort it out.

Bruce Meyer

Missed the first part of this interview? Read it HERE.

Thank you, Bruce!

To order Bruce’s new short story collection, CLICK HERE.

To find out more about Bruce Meyer’s extensive writing life and publications, CLICK HERE.

I’ve been illuminated by Bruce’s answers. I hope you have too!

Poem 157 – yesterday’s wrong & Part I of the Bruce Meyer Interview

Yesterday’s wrong

the wind left in a hurry
got tangled in a field of sunflowers
on the side of an Italian highway
inside a memory flickering in my mind

yesterday’s cloak of Wrong
is still clamped to my clavicle
it’s too hot for this kind of holding
today will be the work of letting go

if you see a shadow limping
it is my Wrong searching for a bone

let it pass

Interview with Bruce Meyer Part I of II

The Hours – Stories from a Pandemic by Bruce Meyer

“In the course of social isolation, social distancing, and social solitude, every hour can seem to last a year. In The Hours, Bruce Meyer presents six stories that showcase how individuals responded to pandemics throughout history with dignity and determination. Whether it is on an island cut off from the rest of the world and connected only by an aging ferry link, through Zoom calls and the realities faced by modern healthcare workers, or through a couple trapped on an abandoned cruiser ship, Meyer depicts the struggle against what we cannot see, and the faith that endures beyond the hardships of the present.” Published by AOS Publishing, June 29, 2021 – books available for pre-sale now!

My friend Bruce Meyer has a new book out. This is a collection of short fictional stories written during this pandemic we’re still dancing with. As mentioned above in the synopsis, Meyers’ latest work dives into the past and face the present with stories about facing the wild landscape of emotions and humanity during times when it is very difficult to do so. But Bruce always finds the beauty. He always finds the love, and he uses his gift of creative writing to hold up this beauty and love for readers. And it helps us feel better. That’s important, isn’t it?

Here is the first five questions and answers in a series of ten between Bruce and I. We hope you enjoy the conversation, and feel the beauty and love!

VS: I’ve been a fan of your poetry for years. Here’s the truth: I had no idea how well-published you are as a fiction writer too! Congratulations on your latest collection of short stories: The Hours – Stories from a Pandemic (AOS Publishing, 2021). I read the collection over two days; devoured it really, and the loudest question in my head was this: how does your creative writing process differ across genres? Let’s say between poetry and short stories?

BM: Anne Michaels and I had a long discussion about this over lunch one day (we’ve known each other since our undergrad days when I was among the first to publish her work. She is gifted with both poetry and fiction. My answer boiled down to this: in fiction, one has to keep track of linear logic and in poetry one has to keep track of metaphorical logic. Metaphorical logic deals with images, startling connections, gaps, leaps, and a hint of narrative whereas the short story or flash fiction can’t do that. Shakespeare, in his plays, never has flashbacks. He can’t. The narrative must always move forward like a shark. He uses digressions such as Gertrude’s report of Ophelia’s death, but he can’t leap around. Poetry can make those leaps, In fact, poetry asks for those leaps. Poetry wants to rely in the thread of a single image whereas with short stories the writer must rely on the thread of time, the character who changes in some way, the development and recreation of a fragment of life and not merely a postcard from life. Some writers I’ve known, such as Atwood, say they can’t work on poetry and fiction at the same time. I do. I find that shifting gears clears my head for the other genre, sometimes in the same hour or same evening. Fiction is also more demanding. The language has to be precise, as in poetry, but it must also be sustained. I tell myself, don’t start an idea you can’t finish. Poems pop into my head and I write them down. Stories get mulled over: in fact, they need to be mulled over and thought-through long before a single word goes to paper because I have to see where the story is going. With poems, I can move stanzas around, lop off sections, tear out middles (it sounds violent and there is a violence from which poems are born — a creative violence) whereas stories are aged. I often get down a first draft and leave it for months, then go back and rewrite the whole thing. Poems demand immediacy. Stories demand aging. That said, I love both because both genres honor the language and the ideas behind the language if they are done right.

VS: This is a timely collection though the subject matter within several of the stories reaches back in time. Yes, there are ‘pandemic’ events/themes within each story, but not all of them focus solely on the COVID virus we are facing now. Tell me how you figured out the time and setting for your stories? You can be specific to a certain story or you can speak to your overall attractions to the times/settings or both! (This is a research question, at its core!)

BM: I didn’t want to write a book about COVID. COVID sucks. I wanted to write (as I usually do with fiction) about people wrestling with challenges and enduring throughout the tough tests they face. The current pandemic is not the first nor, I hate to say, will it be the last. I grew up listening to stories my grandmother told me about the 1918 flu. Her friend’s parents died and the friend (who I knew) had to sew them in the bedsheets they died in and haul their bodies to the curb for the trash collectors to haul away. That was the genesis of the story, “The Island.” People literally dropped in the streets. In the case of non-viral pandemics, no one knows how many people perished in the 1911 heatwave that struck the eastern seaboard of the US and Canada and even hit Toronto and Southern Ontario. My wife, who loves doing her Ancestry.ca work and I were discussing the heat wave and a the Ontario government seized that moment to open up Northern Ontario. That year saw the germ (no pun intended) of the idea of the Northern Ontario Railway. My wife’s father was born in the bush, in a lost place called Lowbush, because his mother went north around that time to work in a lumber camp or a way-station in the middle of nowhere. Pandemics, as I mentioned, take many forms. I had a story, “Vision,” that didn’t make the cut for the book but that one is about the Black Death and its impact on eastern England. What drew me to consider ideas (and I dropped about half a dozen or more stories from the original batch, including one about Tiny Tim the 1960s musical comedian) wasn’t COVID but pandemics. The story, “Yellow Jack” is based on news items I kept running across where the crew abandoned cruise ships and the ships simply drifted around the Atlantic with all the passengers on board. The final story, “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” reinforces the thesis of my fiction: that we can overcome the obstacle in our lives until we are exhausted by them. For that story I wondered, what if someone lost their hearing in the war? I had a cousin on my grandmother’s side who was a Marine sergeant during WWII and a radio operator on Guadalcanal and he lost his hearing when the command post he was talking to exploded. The explosion, heard through earphones, deafened him. He went on, after the war, to have a long a prosperous career. But I kept wondering what would become of someone if they had no postwar plans, and the absurd idea entered my mind about the deaf man becoming a piano tuner, not by hearing but by touching the strings. We had an Englishman who used to come to our house and tune my grandmother’s old upright, and he showed me how I could feel when a string was tight enough to produce the right sound and he said, “You don’t have to hear it, laddie, you can feel it.” When I began The Hours I made a conscious decision to try not to write about COVID, though Zoom is about the offshoot of the current pandemic. I wrote that just as we were “pivoting” to the digital meeting. I know several local nurses who burned out early in the conflict (I think of it as a war), and my own internal medicine doctor appeared at an appointment one day looking as if he’d gone beyond death. From those experiences, I assembled the story. Stories are made up of assemblages of experience — they are the black holes of literary genres because they implode information and narratives, they suck as much into their fiber as the writer will let them. The worst thing a story can do is strike a single note.

VS: I can feel your poetic voice in each of the stories. Your gift for playing with language and masterful metaphor is very alive. Here’s an example: The heat wave that would not leave eastern North America brought madness and death to the cities as it sank its fiery jaws into people’s minds. And another: He kept these sounds wrapped in his mind, as if they were a roadmap back to the safe side of the Pacific. Love it! Tell us about how you make sure your poetic writing ‘voice’ reaches into your fiction.

BM: With that last line you quote — a person doesn’t need to be able to hear the outside world to hear the world inside their own heads. My grandfather was deaf from childhood. I asked him once how he knew so many songs. His pastime was to lean on box television in his bay window, beat time with hands on top, and sing songs from vaudeville pre 1914. He told me he could hear everything inside his head just as he had heard it sixty or seventy years before on the stage at Shea’s Theatre in Toronto. What I have to watch with fiction is the same thing I have to watch with poetry: I need to make sure the voice remained narrative yet detached, that I don’t permit too many adjective or adverbs to creep in, that it maintains a sense of arms-length concreteness of diction so that the action, not the words, is what one remembers. Narrative relies on this separation of voice and language, and the writing of both poetry and fiction boils down to one phrase: just tell it. I didn’t write fiction at university and I regret it. People I knew went on blah-blah excursions about “the craft of fiction.” Yuck. There really isn’t “a craft of fiction.” You get an idea. You tell someone what happened. You tell them what happened as directly and cleanly as you can. And then you walk away. They’ve heard a story. Language can ruin a good story, and I am constantly aware that I have to reel in my florid prooose or the story becomes intolerable. Likewise for poetry. Readers don’t pick up a piece of writing to hear me go on about something in self-indulgent language. They want to know about something — and the more concrete that something can be the better. That’s really all there is to it. Tell the damned story and get out of the way of what happens because readers want to know the character, not the author’s peacock feathers of words. Rilke says to young Franz Kappus, “Mr. Kappus, write about things.” Rilke was spot on.

VS: Do you love roses? The title story ‘The Hours’, is my favourite in the collection. I’ve loved roses since I lived in a small brick house in Windsor’s little Italy – and there were rose bushes galore all around the house. (Windsor is also the ‘city of roses’!) Tell us about your knowledge of roses, plants… how nature finds its way into your writing. How important is it to include nature in your work, overall?

BM: There. I did my job. My story reminded you of something you know and love. That’s what good writing should do. It should try to teach. I shouldn’t try to philosophize. It should trigger, in a personal and gentle way and not in a trigger warning kind of way. I don’t want someone to break their heart before they break their hearts from empathy for what they witness in the character. My grandfather and my mother grew roses. I can’t seem to grow a thing. I’ve had cactuses die on me. My grandfather had a yellow Persian rose that my great grandfather had brought with him from Ireland as a shoot. The story was that the original bush was in the garden of Persepolis when Alexander lay dying and though the stalks were covered in hundreds of thorns — a real bramble — he asked that the flowers be strewn over his death bed. The perfume was incredible. Roses do it all in terms of flowers. Perfume, flowers, even the hips after the petals have dropped, and the potpourri (my wife still has a bowl of potpourri from all the roses I gave her when we were courting, including the bouquet on our wedding night) — all those things made the rose the most complete flower of all. And its nearest kin in the plant world is the apple with its hidden star at the center if you slice the apple equatorially, and all the associations with apples, and garden, and apples being seen as artists such as Cranach saw them… as eyes staring at us. I wouldn’t consider roses or apples to be nature. Nature, for someone who spends time in the northern bush, is a completely different idea of plant life. Roses and apples, gardens and orchards are a form of artifice. They are works of art. To garden to paint a canvas, to take living things and through design and know-how, and seamless transitions, make something entirely unnatural out of living things, and by doing so raise them from the realm of nature to something beyond nature. Call it art. Nature happens. Gardening is created by a gardener. Eden was the first canvas and the characters didn’t quite work out correctly.

VS: This is a publishing question for those of us who are interested in getting our work published. Your poetry and fiction has been published as single entities and also as full books/chapbooks. Where to go to find out about submission calls, contests, etc..? And, is it ‘okay’ to be published by different publishers for your books?

BM: Sure. Why not? I think I could keep five publishers in business. I never repeat myself. Each project is something new. I think it is a writer’s duty to say something new with every story and every poem. I generally get my information on markets from my networks on Facebook and Twitter, from Submittable’s Discovery, and from sources such as Poets and Writers except that Poets ad Writers items are expensive in terms of fees and I try to avoid those. I think people should be pay me to read my work rather than paying magazine editors to read it. Another source is the League of Canadian Poets. I’m a member and they have a regular newsletter with markets in it.

Bruce Meyer, writer, poet, teacher.

Stay tuned for part two of our conversation!

To find out more about Bruce, including his long list of publications, click HERE.

Poem 156 – it doesn’t matter

It doesn’t matter

the second hand on the clock ticks loudly
a steady soundtrack
with the refrigerator gurgle & the
air conditioner exhalation
it’s an orchestral movement
in the living room 
& the sunlight uses
the maple leaves as 
baton directing the morning
into flickering heat waves on the sofa

there’s just one curious fact: the time
on the clock is wrong
it is hours off – the result of a tired battery

I love that it doesn’t matter
time is a maple leaf cupping sunlight
the hum of machinery
how long it takes to write a poem 

Poem 155 – skin tag & the success of joy!

Skin tag

in my peripheral
eye catching collection 
of skin
a reminder to 
notice the blurry
to pause the rapid flurry
of things that pass fast
& see what more you can hold

in your vision under your nose on your face

a fuller smile

OH THE JOY OF THE JOY OF EDITING!

Thank you Abbey and Aimee, and the 30+ writers who joined us in our joy-filled webinar about the joy of editing last evening! Didn’t we have such a ball?! We laughed, we swore (well, I did!), we shared our story – and it was good!

Congratulations to our two book-giveaway winners Adriana and Edward!

We recorded the webinar and the powerpoint is available if anyone is interested in our talk! Let me know!

We wish you a joyful experience in your writer/editor relationships!

Upcoming on the blog…

Good things come in threes:

Q&A with writer Bruce Meyer about his new collection of short stories, The Hours.Q&A with Dream Poet for Hire Marshall James Kavanaugh (yup, he’s the poet who I’ll be joining me on my next virtual tour stop!)Q&A with Windsor writer and idea man Peter Billing about his new book The Road Hockey Crew.

Have a super Friday!