Happy (almost) New Year! I hope that whoever is reading this has been able to find some rest and relaxation this holiday season. It’s been quite a year in terms of politics, politically-charged vigilante violence, a continued refusal (by some) to turn around this thing called global warming, crises large and small around the world,… Read More What I Published This Year: A 2019 Scrapbook
Writer, storyteller, and educator Kate O’Brien Wooddell recently published her first collection, Beasts, through Florida’s Happy Tapir Press. Beasts is a compendium of poems, flash memoir, and even a couple of pieces that verge into surrealism and magic. Beasts covers familial, often politicized themes like motherhood and daughterhood, sexual abuse, travel, memory, and reconciliation, all… Read More “My True Story”: An Interview with Kate O’Brien Wooddell
It’s nearly the end of August, so I thought it would be a good time to reflect on what happened this summer. This post is more for my own records than anything else. I’m not sure how wide the audience is for this type of post, but what’s a blog for anyway? A blog’s a… Read More Summer Send-Off
I have been staying in Charleston, SC for a few days to clear my mind before school starts and to get some writing done (and also because, right now, all of my paying work can be done remotely). My plan was to go through the full-length manuscript I “finished” in January. Though I have been… Read More A Few Days in Charleston
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… Read More What, Oh What to Read and Write in 2019
The best way to get your poems published is to send them out. That being said, you’ll end up receiving more rejections than acceptances, no matter who you are. The whole thing is just a numbers game. So why not reframe and welcome the reality of those inescapable rejections? One way to do this is… Read More Rejection City, Here I Come: Trying to Accrue 100 Rejections in 2018
This semester, I have started teaching a writing and rhetoric class (thrilling! surprising! edifying! terrifying!) to first-year college students at my university. Though we aren’t writing poems in the class, I’ve found myself reflecting a lot on my own poetry writing process because no matter what genre you’re writing in, all writing has something in… Read More 13 Ways to Revise a Poem
One of my major projects this summer was reviewing Adrienne Rich’s Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert. One of the biggest challenges with this piece was that there is so much ground to cover in a collected volume of prose that spans more than 50 years, but… Read More Reviewing the Essential Essays of Adrienne Rich
I’ve been having conversations recently about voice and audience, social media and readership, work and attention. As writers, how do we find good homes for our writing? Is a platform “better” if there are more readers? Is it wrong to want additional readers? What about the moral issues we have with social media? We’re “supposed… Read More Links I Like: August 2018 Edition
Right now, I should be writing…something else. I am trying to finish up two book reviews today. I need to scale down many, many pages of notes. I should be planning the class I’m supposed to start teaching later this month. Should be reading the stack of books I’m trying to finish before the summer… Read More Oh, Buoyant Group of Artist-Friends
