September brings a new beginning, the start of a new year, my own birthday near to the high holidays, days when the gates swing open, and the book of life is ready to be written in, again. It is also 4th Street Fair of the Arts & Crafts in my hometown of Bloomington and the Spoken Word Stage and Poetry on Demand. Tony sets up manual typewriters and perfectly squared 5 x 8 pieces of paper and away we go. People come up and order a poem, they might share a word, a favorite anim

On the way home from town yesterday in the surprising cool of a late August afternoon I noticed a tinge of yellow on the leaves. It seems an early fall is approaching. Late August used to be still summer, but now the kids have been back in school for weeks and I am throwing an extra blanket on the bed at night. My new year, both my birthday and Rosh Hashanah are only a few weeks away. August was a busy month full of work and family and my own writing objectives I hardly looke

Last week I took a course at the writing festival in Iowa City called Novel in a Week taught by Kelly Dwyer.  I discovered why it was was that even though I could hear my character’s voices,  see their shoes, feel the tension of their decisions on my own skin, I kept writing myself into corners. Simply it is because I think like a poet. Poetry is my first language, fiction is a new vocabulary, cadence, rhythm, I am trying to learn. It is not writing prose that was stumping me

It is my first grandson’s birthday today. From the first he has been a gift, along with my title of Nana. Being a grandparent I am able to step back and so I get to see him in a another kind of light. Parenthood has its own magic but along with the heart breaking wide open there is a fierceness. And of course there are all the other things you are trying to do as you are raising your children. Grandparenthood, for me, is full of tenderness, and play. I don’t have to worry ab

A habit of words. #napowrimo #poetry #Writing

I have written a poem a day for the last twenty-two days. I gave my word to do it and so I did. It is not about inspiration or finding more time. I developed a habit. It has to do with practice. It has nothing to do with good or bad. Nothing to do with how much I have to say, or whether I am doing something new, or working on something old. It is a habit of words. A habit of lines. A habit of sitting with a page that is blank and filling it. The constancy of showing up. The i

It’s poetry month and I am writing a poem a day with a small group of friends. We are posting up to a private shared page where we get to read each other’s poems and shout out lines. So far I have written eight poems, I may even go back to a few of them, but for now the important thing is not just that I am writing but that I have a community to share the joy I find in playing with language, a group of voices that cheer each other on. Community and poetry are two words we oft

I will not be hosting Seder tonight or tomorrow, a rarity for me. We will be sharing it with friends at their homes. I’ve always loved Pesach because it is a holiday of shared story. It is an invitation, some might say a command, to examine oppression and liberation and the journey between and beyond them. The story twists and bends a little differently in every home. The themes remain central and constant, the exploration unique Here is my own Passover poem originally publis

Woke to a dense fog this morning. Winter disappearing. There is no snow left on the ground. The freeze on the pond has become mist, all but the thinnest layer. The air hanging thickly above the yard is full of what was cold and white. It is a very different fog then the one that rolled in from the sea when we lived in San Francisco. There, so near the ocean, it billowed in morning and evening. Engulfing one street at a time. Some days there would be a fog so thick in the fron

I have entered a new phase in my relationship with the book I am working on. After almost a week of being home alone, with multiple snows that have kept me in and focused, I have been paying attention not just to the work, but to how I work. Most of my writing has been poetry and short pieces of prose. Both of those forms allow for a very different relationship to writing then the long winding path of a novel. The difference feels like meeting a friend for a drink and having

Wishing Time Away. #place #poetry #time #Writing

Winter has seen fit to descend finally and the last days have been bitter cold and snow covered, nothing like the northeast I know. But this is southern Indiana and a few inches here feel like at least ten did when I lived in Buffalo many years ago. Perspective shifts reality. Well sometimes. Take the field across from my home. I live at the end of a long dead end drive. In summer we can’t see any other homes, in winter I can glimpse two houses across the ravine. For 15 years

Here’s what I love about giving a reading – it makes me look at my work in a different way. I search out themes and rhythms, timings, flow, density and lightness. I compose. I find poems that have lain dormant and revive them, I revisit poems I think were finished and put them back in the to revise folder. I write something new to fill a space or connect two pieces. I decide to insert a short prose piece to give people a place to rest in story, and not balance on image and me

At sundown this evening Rosh Hashanah begins. Over the last five years I’ve given time in the preceding weeks to puzzling out how I want to celebrate the high holy days this time around. For over twenty years before this a group of friends always spent the holidays together, in one another’s homes sharing traditions and creating new ones. I was trying to decide what to carry forward in to this year and what to set aside. How do I want to spend Rosh Hashanah, and at the close

I hadn’t submitted anything to the last issue of Rattle, the theme of single parenthood didn’t apply to me. At least that’s what I thought until poem after poem resonated, and it occurred to me I was raised by a single parent. How can I have spent fifty years without recognizing this? Widowed in 1965, after 26 years of a good marriage, my mother was left with a daughter just entering adolescence. That first year we shared a room, by the next year my brothers were gone and we

What I see outside my window is silence. I don’t mean there are no sounds, but rather there is an absence of noise, I hear a woodpeckers drumming, a cardinal, a distant crow and other bird songs I can’t identify. There is the humming of a bee, a far away drone of a plane but no other people, no cars, no click of shoes on pavement. There is no crowdedness. I live at the end of a one lane country road and from my desk I look out onto an expanse of green that reaches into a pale

Much of the reason I started this blog is give myself a mandate to practice writing something in a short prose form addressed to a reader. For a number of years I did radio essays for our local community radio station, WFHB, and that kept me in a 500 word, four-and a-half minute rhythm. It’s a construct that I really like – it sharpens my thinking, and in turn my writing. For me it’s a form that demands I say what I mean in a way that is clear enough for readers to actually s