Banned Books in a Memorial Day Parade

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Travel, Writing

We are headed to Whidbey Island in Washington State on Thursday via Port Townsend. The Ioniq5 gets its first electric road trip test and then some! We will motor the Olympic Peninsula then travel by ferry to visit with dear friends after half a year of not much travel, health crises, assorted this and that. There will be a parade in Coupeville on Saturday I believe and we are going to march in it along with other volunteers who celebrate and promote the public library and all of its good works on that island. And I am going to sport my clear backpack full of books that far too many want to ban. Margaret Atwood. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Toni Morrison. George Orwell. The 1619 Project. Harper Lee. Toni Morrison again
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Inhabiting an Inner Stance

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Wisdom, Writing

After the shock of the U.S. Presidential Election in 2016, oh so many of us felt upended, and at loose ends. A wise and deeply soulful friend encouraged me to do some soul searching and craft my personal inner stance, statements that could inspire and guide me when the waves got choppy, when the going got rough. I crafted my angst into words; time and time again during those turbulent years, I would steady myself by taking a look at my words. Speed ahead in time to find us eight years later and, amazingly, shockingly, horribly, things these days seem to be even worse.

 
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RIP to Alice Munro, the GOAT of the Short Story

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Arts & Culture, Writing

The news just came over the wires—well, they are the bits and bytes, ones and zeroes, of the Internet these days I guess. Sometime last night, while I was winging my way back from a visit to my son in Burbank, California, Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel prizewinning master of the short story, died in a Port Hope, Ontario care home after nearly 93 years of a long and interesting life. …

 
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Writing in Form: The Prose Poem

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Poetic Form, Publication News, Writing

I started my creative writing journey in the wilds of prose, specifically fiction. My SUNY-Binghamton graduate school classes concentrated on fiction; my master’s thesis was a novel-in-progress. Even when I started making the shift to writing more poetry, I still dabbled in the prose poem—it felt familiar and doable to me. According to the Poetry Foundation, a prose poem is “a prose composition that, while not broken into verse lines, demonstrates other traits such as symbols, metaphors, and other figures of speech common to poetry.”

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Book Review: The Art of Voice by Tony Hoagland

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Arts & Culture, Book Report, Poetic Form, Writing

There are numerous ways to bring the art of the voice into poetry. We speak. We converse. We inhabit personas and personalities. We wail. We squawk. We squeal. We complain. We rant, rave, and react. We sound off with authority and verve. We simply and merely utter. And this is all the part of the notion of poetic voice. And in all of these varied utterances, we instinctively inhabit multiple registers of diction—high, middle, and low according to the late poet Tony Hoagland (with Kay Cosgrove) in his short, sweet, and very smart book of essays, The Art of Voice: Poetic Principles and Practice…

 
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