They’ve started to trickle in: the not-unexpected rejection letters from the dozen or so contests I entered a few months back, inevitably telling me that my poetry manuscript has not been selected for a prize or for publication
To Leap Is to Fly
I recently returned to writing poetry after years in the prose wilderness, writing short stories and the inevitable attempt-at-novel. While I’d never abandoned the reading poems—a love from way back when—in graduate school, my workshops and classes were focused around the craft of fiction. Oh, I waded into the…
The Wind in the Trees
It’s nearly the end of this windy Monday. I am listening to the wind pitch the camellia and rhododendron trees out front into the leaded glass window. This is not a trivial storm, the rain and eddies of wind are definitely mixing it up out there, like we are the bowl of eggs, waiting to be stirred, to be beat. Every now and then, too, the obligatory window-rattling sounds…
Keeping the Heart Open
I went to a writing weekend at Esalen in Big Sur, California back in October 2003. At the final session, all the attendees gathered together and we were all asked to reflect on these questions: What do I do to keep my heart open? How do I stay in touch with the source of compassion inside myself in these difficult times?…
Dew on the Grass
In March 2009, a dear friend chose to begin the process of dying “consciously.” What does that mean in this culture so notoriously youth-obsessed and morality-denying?…
A Tao of Writing
In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called…
Hold These Truths
These days, when civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s…
Dem Bones
It’s been over twenty years since Natalie Goldberg urged us to “free the writer within” in what seemed, at the time, her groundbreaking (well, in some circles) book, Writing Down the Bones, first published in 1986. Yep, Reagan was still President…
Pillow Talk
A while back, I took an online class that was all about getting past writer’s block. I’m not even sure that I had a case of writer’s block at the time; I’d been writing away fairly regularly, with the usual peripatetic ups and down but somehow something felt—and thus kept getting—stuck. Looking back now, I think what I mostly needed at that moment was…
Hammering It Home: Poetry’s Nuts and Bolts
Mary Oliver is a beloved contemporary poet. Her work is read at weddings and funerals and by Garrison Keillor on his radio show, “The Writer’s Alamanac.” Even my yoga teacher in Corvallis, Oregon, often began our class with inspirational lines from Oliver’s work…
