Writer in the (Storm-Battered) House

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Wisdom, Writing

A while back now—egad, ten years, February 2014!—I was invited to be the Writer in the House at the Oregon Writers Colony in Rockaway Beach, Oregon. Per their website, “Oregon Writers Colony founders built the organization from a small group of writers who wanted a writing retreat at the beach into a nonprofit organization that offers support, networking, and a retreat house for writers

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Coloring the Days

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Wisdom, Writing

I have begun the annual winter rainy season task of cleaning stuff out. The file drawers are mostly done so now I am on to folders of this-and-that saved over the years for what reason? So I could use what I had stashed in writing of my own? Something I stumbled on that was written nearly twenty years ago: a four-part essay series called “Things to Come” by Michael Ventura…

 
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Acceptance News: The Poeming Pigeon

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

My poem, “Lamentation: A Cento,” has been accepted for publication in the fourteenth issue of The Poeming Pigeon in Fall 2024. This is one of forty-seven centos that make up my unpublished book manuscript, I Am Speechless: A Book of Centos. It is also included in my manuscript, Brief Campaigns of Sting and Sweet, currently making the rounds of assorted poetry book contests…

 
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New Year and the Undoing

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, Book Report, History Lessons, Musings, Writing

End of the holiday season so swiftly upon us. Ornaments wrapped, stored in the growing inventory of empty Garrett’s popcorn cans. Glass icicles removed, laid to rest in a metal, candy-caned tin tied with a sateen bow. Strings of red beads, garland, back in their indigo blue box. Light strings unclipped and tied with twine until needed again next year…

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Backstory about My Poem, “Ernestine”

Nancy FlynnApostrophe Blog Archive, History Lessons, Publication News, Writing

In the summer of 2022, I started to read Heather Clark’s acclaimed new biography, Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Seven pages into the first chapter entitled “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” we learn that not only is there a multi-generational history of mental illness in Plath’s family but, unknown to her, her paternal grandmother, Ernestine, was committed to the Salem asylum by her husband, Theodore, in October 1916…

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