What’s In a Word?

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Art Exhibit, Musings, Neighborhood, Writing

There are a series of language lessons on a fence a few blocks from our house. Take a bunch of critters, mount them in tiny dioramas on a wooden fence and add their names in three languages—Chinook, English, and Spanish. What do you have? A cross-cultural language lesson and an art installation all in one. And one that acknowledges the folks who lived on this land before us and, frankly, to whom it rightfully belongs. Before I quit Facebook …

 
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Publication News: “Paradise Road”

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

My poem, “Paradise Road,” has been accepted for publication in the May 2025 print and digital editions of Voices Unbound: An Anthology of International Poetry. A project of Fresh Words: An International Literary Magazine, Voices Unbound is a space for poems that explore the myriad facets of life, love, loss, identity, resilience, and the world around us…

 
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So Much Beauty…

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Travel

What could be better than to take the exit for Brooks, Oregon just north of Salem and went your way on a two-lane road to bear witness to dozens of acres of peonies almost at the peak of their springtime bloom? That is what we managed to find the time to do on our drive back from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon a week or so ago

 
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Poem-a-Day Publication at What Rough Beast

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

Several years back, my poem, “One June Day: Fire, Heat, & Children Locked in Cages at the Texas-Mexico Border,” was published at the poem of the day online at What Rough Beast on November 30, 2018. Edited by Michael Broder, What Rough Beast was a daily poetry site attempting to chronicle the travesties of the first (accidental) Trump administration…

 
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All That Remains in the Light

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Musings, Writing

Spring with all of its blooming and blossoming is a good time of year to learn how to see the world anew again. About a month ago, I had cataracts removed from both of my eyes. Since then, I not only have extraordinary distance vision for the first time almost sixty years but the world seems somehow brighter than ever. Throughout the day, I find myself startled…

 
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Blank Verse: Old-Fashioned Yet Modern

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Poetic Form, Writing

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter. An iamb is a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable. Pentameter means there are five of those in a line. You most likely known the sound of blank verse and don’t even know it. Recognize this?
But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun…

 
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Keep on reading in the free (for now) world…

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Book Report, Wisdom, Writing

Tonight, I am finishing up a novel called Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey. Harvey won the latest Booker Prize for her excellent slim novel, Orbital. Last week I read a superb non-fiction book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; it shed new, compelling light on the 1955 lynching of the young Emmett Till…

 
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We Can Still Have (Some) Nice Things

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Neighborhood, Writing

Today was my first visit to the recently remodeled, newly reopened North Portland branch of the Multnomah County Library to return books I had finished reading, to pick up new ones waiting for me on the hold shelf. North Portland Library began as the North Albina Reading Room in 1909. The Jacobethan-style library was built in 1913 and renovated in 1999. The building closed in April 2023 for construction which included additional space to accommodate a new Black Cultural Center, updated technology, and new artwork…

 
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