Okay, so we’re almost two months into 2019. What’s been going on in the world of this blog?
2019: What’s happening?
Savoring new publications written by friends
- If you like fairy tales, philosophy, and the fantastic, Jonathan Duckworth’s chapbook Book of Never is well worth your time.
- Copies of other friends’ books are on their way: Chloe Firetto-Toomey’s Little Cauliflower and Angie Trudell Vasquez’s In Light, Always Light. Can’t wait to read these!
- My professors Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade have a brand new collaborative memoir (!) called The Unrhymables. Here’s a collaborative interview they published a few years ago.
- I was (finally) able to get my hands on a copy of Noel Pabillo Mariano’s wonderful chapbook dispatches from the mushroom kingdom. Perhaps you, like me, have some nostalgia for Mario Bros. video games, but who would have thought that the game could be translated into beautiful meditations on brotherhood and the hero’s journey?
Celebrating poetry community
- My friend Margaret Rozga is the new Poet Laureate of Wisconsin!
- I recently reviewed Michael Hettich’s exquisite, liquid, prose poetry collection Bluer and More Vast for South Florida Poetry Journal. Check out the review, but more importantly, check out Michael’s book.
- My friend Chazz Chitwood has launched the website for Udon Shop: An Arts Collective, an online writing community. Very excited to see what Chazz rolls out as the year goes on! Special thanks to Chazz, also, for helping me figure out several technical aspects of this very website—the one on which you’re reading this blog post.
- I did a collaborative interview with Cathleen Chambless, Christopher Alphonso, and JV Portelo in The Mirror, the glossy magazine produced by South Florida Gay News. The interview is about what it might mean to be a queer writer in South Florida. It’s available online as well as in hard copy in Wilton Manors, FL and beyond.
Reading and writing here in South Florida
- I’ll be on a panel called “In Search of a Friendlier Climate: Miami as a Crossroads in Poetry and Nonfiction” with Jemercis Lazo and Terin Weinberg at the Crossroads of the Translantic Conference Student Humanities Conference at Nova Southeastern University. Let us know if you’ll also be there!
- I’m teaching “The Writing on the Wall,” a poetry workshop through the Palm Beach Poetry Festival’s community outreach program on Saturday, March 2nd at 1:00 pm at Old School Square in Delray Beach. We will be examining metaphorical “walls” within poems. We’ll practice sizing the walls up, writing on them, and breaking them down. The workshop is 2.5 hours and costs $10. I’ll post a link to register once it becomes available.
- 2019 is the year I will also have the pleasure of working with Reading Queer and O, Miami, two other poetry organizations I’ve admired since moving to the state! Stay tuned for more details involving typewriters, photo exhibits, poetry performance art, and more…
What are your goals in 2019?
This year is, in many ways, off to a hard start, especially thinking about our country and our world. It is hard, I think, to hold all of it at once, mentally, emotionally, and otherwise. What kinds of activism have you been doing to address the major issues we’re facing collectively?
The flip side of that question is this: How have you been taking care of yourself? These are just a few of the questions I want to blog and dialogue about as the year goes on.
Freesia McKee 