Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Writing”
Suddenly, out of the blue, I’ve found myself motivated to gather up a whole passel of my recent poems into yet another book-length collection. Well, it wasn’t exactly out of the blue. I was spurred onward when I saw the notice for the John Ridland Poetry Prize, a new prize open to poets 55 years and older
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In June of 2015, my first full-length poetry collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar, was published by Cayuga Lake Books of Ithaca, New York. A few months later in August, Mountain Writers hosted a book launch and reading for me at Vie de Bohème…
Two centos from my draft manuscript, I Am Speechless—“Cusp” and “where late the sweet birds sang”—have been accepted for published in the When It Rains It Pours anthology from Kind of a Hurricane Press…
Was having my Letter to the Editor published in the esteemed Poetry Magazine back in 2008. Here is the brief text: Dear Editor,
As I wound my way through Eavan Boland’s “Islands Apart: A Notebook” [May 2008], in which she writes of the increasingly skill-based nature of poets, I was surprised to find this:…
My poem, “Learning to See,” won Third Place in the Theme—Ekphrasis category of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2023 Contest. I wrote about this poem in a recent Apostrophe Blog post, explaining the concept of Ekphrastic Poetry and how I came to write this particular poem….
Qarrtsiluni published my poem about my maternal grandfather, “About the Laying-on of Bricks not Hands” in their Worship issue back in October 2011. Part of their process was having poets record a reading of the poem. My voice actually does the content of this serious narrative poem justice, I think.
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I just found out this morning that two of my poems have been awarded Third Place in two categories of the Oregon Poetry Association Fall 2023 adult contests. The first, “provenance,” has placed in the Members Only category—the category name explains itself….
Below is a found poem that was part of a Zoom memorial service celebration for a neighbor during the isolating years of the pandemic. I created it from the amazing trove of gratitude posts my neighbor made over the years before she was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer…
In the dark days of 2019, what made a poem political? Was it the subject matter? The tone of voice? Was it engagement with current events, hot-bed issues in the national or regional press? There generally are no final answers to these existential questions.
Some journals want brief ones—fifty words and no more—and you begin to worry you will somehow be punished if you go over the limit. Others let you ramble on and on, a veritable laundry list of publications and schools attended. Over the years, I’ve tried a number of approaches…
