Patterns of Incandescence, Indigo Grief and Sky Girl: Tracking the Body When the Book Goes Live

Catherine Daley, Aurora #313
Photo by Robyn Beattie

"...in deeply introverted, self-reflective states, brooder and brooded become one in egg-like nuclear processes of crystallization..." The Book of Symbols, Taschen



Fool’s dog, rose, abyss.

Blank book in velvet pouch, spines

Braced for fertile fall.

Heart light, yellow smock,

Red happy boots. I could stop

Or start, sleep, or dream.

When I fall, I wake 

As you, rowan moon silver,

Citrus in my hands.

--Three For the Fool (from this year's Haiku practice)

Just before November Butterfly launched (November 1, 2014, Saddle Road Press), I said to a girlfriend, I wish I could hold this book up to the sky and say: Here are my poems about sunflowers and unicorns!

She, sage and lovely, responded: Why would your poems be made up only of sunflowers and unicorns? Life certainly isn’t.

Another asked, Are you sad? You’re saying goodbye to something that used to belong just to you. 

They’re both right.  Still, I don’t let go or grow any more gracefully than the next human. Lately I’m uncomfortably aware of a woolly impulse to cocoon or perhaps hibernate in a velvet-lined cloak.

But when you put a book you’ve held close to your heart for years finally out into the world, you have no choice but to grow.  And you certainly can’t hide. I’ve been thinking a lot about a question one of my favorite “sane-media-for-writers” experts Dan Blank (We Grow Media) posed in one of his newsletters five months ago, “What are writers afraid of?”

Tania Pryputniewicz

My answer would be: “Annihilation.” I know it sounds extreme. But the fear of annihilation stems from a fear of exposure directly tied to the content of a handful of the poems in November Butterfly based on rape (both imagined through the eyes of a historical figure and actual). Intellectually, I know better than to fear annihilation, and I know the handful of poems I'm allowing to cause anxiety sit wreathed and far outnumbered by poems focusing on the beauty of earthly incarnation, motherhood and love.

Earlier on blog tour, before the book was out, I was able to address this issue calmly and rationally:

When private writing about trauma, however altered or housed in genre (memoir, creative non-fiction, fiction, or even poetry) goes public, for the writer there’s a re-enactment of exposure. But what differs from the trauma and one’s work appearing is the agency one has as storyteller, the distance one is away from the triggering event, the support of loved ones, and eventually, one hopes, the joy of a kind readership.” (Read rest of First Poetry Book Publication, Fear of Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking.)

But just as the book materialized from ethereal template on a computer to physical object--poems out of my head and into heads of others--the body had a thing or two to say. As I vacillated between two selves (the self thrilled to be moving on to write new poems for a second collection and the self panicked at thought of moving out of the familiar, suppressive corridors of the past), I came down with a cold.  

Forced to rest and be still, unable to sleep thanks to accompanying fever, I found familiar metaphors visiting one by one: bruised throats, fistfuls of lillies, a murky indigo blue sorrow like the grief that surrounded me just after the birth of my second child in the first days after an encounter with a midwife triggered memories (Sheila's Vine, in Labor Pains and Birth Stories). So palpable, those hoops of shame, lit up like arcs of the Northern Lights above me. 

So of course I haikued my way out…

Indigo griefs—old—

Night’s rainbows, like bruises bloom

Once witnessed, loved, fade.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I wish the “fade” part would speed up. Days when I’m down on the process, I just want to be whole, another woman capable of desire and joy without intrusion of past. Which of course, for many hours of many days, I am (whole and happy, that is). Which leads me to a sterling concept from another of Dan Blank's newsletters in which he challenged writers to prepare for success. Because both failure and success signal change, require growth. 

I remember years ago (in my tiny flat on Morningside Drive in Iowa City) using paint to create visuals for where I felt creatively blocked. In broad strokes of dark orange against a cobalt sky, the figure of a woman floating took shape, mostly an outline of head and shoulders slimming without feet to a point like an astral projection. I called her "The Fear/Joy." Were I to paint a new woman, embodying the psychic block, as Blank helped me articulate it, I think it would be: "Annihilation/Success."

Butterfly Shadow by Peter Pryputniewicz

As always it matters to cultivate the image garden, to surround oneself with beautiful words, arts, and minds. I love the relaxed and kind way Blank urges us to grow into our goals as writers at a pace that makes sense for one's life and for the long haul. I fill my journals with an eye towards patterns of incandescence, light within mirroring light without. Body as geode, crystallizing. Needing to balance  awarenesses of shadow self and light self. I think about this, driving at night, noticing the way we can't stand to let the night have its dark, filling the countryside with ambient light...


Ambient light's haze
Milky Way's geode blue masked,
We lose sacred dark.

...and so I fill my journals with reading notes about comets seeding the Earth with DNA, (The Book of Symbols), Aurora the Roman Goddess of the dawn crossing the sky to meet brother Helios (Auroras: Fire in the Sky), and lines about Virgo's Three Goddesses (Eve, Isis, and Mary) from astrologer and healer Bonnie Orgren's Stardust Seven Ray Services Soul Centered Astrology Reports.

One final insight about that woozy fever night: eventually the body relinquished its image train. And the Northern Lights morphed from metaphor for shame to unhindered memory of physical beauty I remember witnessing so long ago, gazing up into the Illinois sky as a child: 

Sky girl’s apron falls

Hem first rippling crimson

Orchard of stars hers.

I don’t know who she is, but I love her, this Sky Girl. I’ll climb her apron strings and into the pocket she surely wears just over her heart. Worth the risk of the climb, if only for the view, that orchard of stars to claim.

Related Links

Here are links to the work of a few of the women writers I lean on for strength as I move through this writing/exposure/vulnerability cycle:

Hand-painted Prompt Cards by Suzi Banks Baum

Suzi Banks Baum, of Laundry Line Divine, editor of An Anthology of Babes: 36 Women Give Motherhood a Voice: in a post titled Serendipity Tromps: Quest 2015:

"I will shake loose of my own expectations to look like I have my act together.

I will work, regardless of a confident measured plot, but work with loyalty to my devotion at a pace that supports my roles as writer, maker and mother."

Dora E. McQuaid, Poet, Teacher, Activist, Remarkable Women: Profiles, Art:

"Tell the truth of your own life, your own story, however challenging or uplifting it may be. You never know whom you might change or effect, including yourself."

See also Dora's website for poetry, resources, and more. Dora's latest poetry book is the scorched earth (with companion audio version).

Ruth Thompson, my editor at Saddle Road Press, author of Woman with Crows and Here Along Cazenovia Creek, in an interview conducted by TCJWW:

"I know from my own experience that what you come to, through the death of the self, is a place where the light pours in."

Michelle Wing, Saddle Road Press sister and author of the poetry collection, Body on the Wall, is also one of the editors of the newly released, Cry of the Nightbird, Writers Against Domestic Violence. Wing, in an interview with TCJWW: 


"I am still writing poems about things that happened many years ago. This is not because I dwell in the past, or because I spend sleepless nights worrying about these things. It is because when I can pull up one more memory out of the vault, turn it over in the light, find both its ugliness and its beauty, and then limn its shape in the form of a poem...I can put that demon to rest."

December 30, 2014 addition:

Ginny Lee Taylor, blogger at Women of Wonder: write. breathe. heal., offers a beautiful post with some hands on suggestions for a livable pace of working with memories and healing:

"And why should we risk triggering and more pain?

Because doing so helps us along on our healing journey, helps us to let go of those sticky threads holding us in the past. By journaling or talking to trusted others about our shadow bag contents, we not only unburden our stories unto someone else or our journals, but more importantly we create a new personal narrative about that memory or feeling, the creation of which is a powerful force in healing from our wounds."

See her simple and sane suggestions here: 

Diving into Your ShadowBag, part 2: #Quest2015

Upcoming January Classes I'll be Teaching:

Luna on the Majors

The Wheel of Archetypal Selves: From Fool to Visionary (The Major Arcana from 0 to V) Online with Story Circle Network

I’m very excited about this class…for some time now I have wanted to take a gradual writing tour through the Major Arcana to follow on the heels of The Minor Mentors class I taught in the spring. Thanks to Story Circle Network, we embark in January 2105. We start with the first six Majors in this class. We’ll write to medleys of images starting with the Fool and end six weeks later with The Hierophant. Approaching the Tarot from a relaxed and open-hearted stance, we will journal and write to prompts and focus on connecting our prior experiences to the archetypes. 

Course runs January 12 to February 23; cost is $192 for members and $240 for non-members. For a unit by unit description and to sign up, visit The Wheel of Archetypal Selves. 

Wether or not you sign up for class, if you love the Tarot, I hope you’ll check out the Wheel of Fortune Tarot’s website. Special thanks to my friend Barbara Rockman (author of the poetry collection Sting and Nest, reviewed here by the Mom Egg) for sharing the link with me. I am stunned not only by the deck’s black and white photographic montage/images, but I am in love with the Wheel of Fortune Tarot's three-dimensional installation (Burning Man 2104). A series of adjacent doors form a perfect ferris wheel round Tarot house or sort of open sky/scarved temple. Each door hosts on its inner side one life-sized Major Arcana (facing into the room the doors form). Anne Stavely and Jill Sutherland are the designers and creators behind the deck. 

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Beginning Blogging 

In person at San Diego Writers, Ink

I’ll be offering a four part blogging series of classes (from Beginning Blogging to Advanced Blogging) in person through San Diego Writers, Ink, starting in January, 2015. Here is the link to the first series of classes for Beginning Bloggers. I welcome bloggers at any point on their blogging trajectory, and former students are always welcome to join us again for blog support. I tailor my courses to fit the needs of each forming class.

New Perhaps, Maybe videos with Liz Brennan

Maybe in the cool morning of fall when the brightest jewels of the hummingbird’s garden fan out from twining vines…. Read text of The Hummingbird's Complaint. Or watch Liz and I reading The Hummingbird’s Complaint.

Maybe like a fish in a bowl in a house of cats…Read text of The Unasked Question. Or watch Liz and I reading The Unasked Question.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Latest Poetry Prompt for November Butterfly:

I'm enjoying writing poetry prompts for the poems in November Butterfly. The Nefertiti on the Astral prompt signals the end of Section 1 prompts; up next, Mordred's Dream. Come write with me here if you love the Queen of Egypt:

Nefertiti on the Astral

And if nothing else, read this amazing Clive James poem, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower

For beautiful photos of the Auroras, see Auroras: Fire in the Sky

Dan Bortolotti, with photographs by Yuichi Takasaka.

Image Credits: As labelled, by Robyn Beattie; additional artwork by yours truly, Peter Pryputniewicz, and Suzi Banks Baum as labelled. 

If you are still reading, and have the heart, I'd love to hear in comments how you navigate your fears as a writer, your exposures, and your vulnerabilities. Blessings to each and every writer in my life.

Revising Guinevere, Ten Writers Transforming Rape, or When Trees Mattered More Than Boys

Photo and Artwork by Robyn Beattie

Most of us have to be transplanted, like a tree, before we blossom, Louise Nevelson, Dawns and Dusks, Conversations with Diana MacKown

This boat throne was made and photographed by my poetry micro-movie collaborator Robyn Beattie. She sent me both the raw image and the fired, color version, but my love for twilight won, hence the grey-white. I’m unable to resist the metaphor for passage, spiritual and physical.

In other 2014 news, I finally put up my writing desk—it only took a year. Here’s the photo of the altar above it. If you look closely, you can see the seams of repairs to both angel wings from the time my husband walked into the bedroom and pulled his shirt over his head with such force his kinetic vigor, from three feet away, pulled her right off the altar in a semi-circle to land at my feet. And that was when we only had one child…

The maiden (artwork by John Shannon, Tree-Free Greetings) stands in a boat the angel blocks. I chose the card because back when we lived in the redwoods I felt like a barefoot waif in the Story of the Root Children (by Sibylle Von Olfers) waiting for Mother Earth in spring: “Wake up, as soon as you’re ready, I’ll open the doors up to the ground.” The deep greens and burgundies of the garments here resonated with my experience of living surrounded by tree roots. And while she’s pretty, this Guinevere, rowan lipped and crowned by leaves, her eyes remain trained on the periphery where intuition lies.

I decided to keep her on the altar in the new house, because, well, Guinevere has me in her grip. As she has for some time now. The Guinevere section of my forthcoming poetry collection, November Butterfly, has grown now to more than ten poems. I’m supposed to be in the grip of revision, and instead I keep writing new Guinevere poems. Now even Lancelot seems to want to add his two cents, even though he’s already the subject of a handful of poems. It could go on, as I wrote in an email to a much coveted potential blurber, til the zebras return from the watering hole.

Which is why it is a godsend to have a deadline. My gracious poetry editor, Ruth Thompson (Saddle Road Press), author of  Here Along Cazenovia Creek and Woman Without Crows, sides with Guinevere and agrees to move book release out to November 2014 so I have more hours. With Guinevere. And Joan, and Amelia. Under Ruth’s careful stewardship, the manuscript just might take its proper form.  She caught me using Queen Anne’s Lace, writing from Hilo with her usual verve, “This pulled me up short. Isn’t Queen Anne’s Lace named after Queen Anne? And didn’t she come along years after Guinevere?”  

Greeting Card by Jan Kalyani Lochner
Photo by Robyn Beattie

And like a good editor, she sends a link to a website, World Carrot Musuem, where one can trace the lineage of plant names, for it turns out, what we used to call wild carrot. Other names: Bird’s Nest and Devil’s plague. Possible truth: first seeds arrived via the pilgrims in their sacks of grain. Root use: inducing uterine contractions. Tea: helps with urinary stones. Ancient spell: the burgundy floret increases fertility. For men: desire, potency. Question: Is the colored floret a genetic oddity? Or decoy, giving heightened notions of desirability, stained floret posing as bug already sitting in the heart of the flower?

I’ve always loved Queen Anne’s lace, my earliest associations from Illinois: chasing redwing blackbirds, popping hot tar bubbles on the roads to the farmhouse we rented, fishing with my brother for minnows in the stream with bologna. But after teenhood, the red dot in the center of the white became a symbol for what it feels like to not be able to hide something that has happened to you. Boys: rumors, crossed lines, things you can’t take back. You feel marked. I’ve done every woman’s number of hours in therapy threshing it out of the system. I like to think I’ve moved on in on my life. But not enough to not notice the perfect metaphor Queen Anne’s lace embodies with its one tiny red floret in the center surrounded by all that purity of sister florets, unmarred.

Here’s a floret flurry's worth of writers I admire for how they handle the topic of rape: Joan Swift, The Dark Path of Our Names (poetry), Diana Rivers, Journey to Zelindar (fiction), Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You (fiction).  I first read Dark Path of Our Names in a Women Poets class taught by Sandra McPherson; years later, I was thrilled to have the chance to interview not only Joan about a subsequent book, Snow on a Crocus: Formalities of a Neonaticide, but Sandra McPherson as well; both women address in their interviews the power of using form when writing about difficult subjects such as rape or neonaticide (see Sandra's interview, Poetry's Secret Rooms: Bloodlines, Adoption, and The Spaces Between Birds and Joan's interview, The Poetry of Joan Swift: Snow on a Crocus, Formalities of a Neonaticide).

Several years ago (thank you Aunt Rose), I stumbled on Persia Woolley's beautiful Guinevere Trilogy (Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, and Guinevere, The Legend in Autumn). Though rape is certainly not the central motif in this series of novels, I adore Woolley's unflinching pages she devotes to the incident and its aftermath. There's no quick return to mobility, physically or psychologically. Guinevere narrates, "From the far safety of detachment, I told myself it was not I he was touching; only the flesh, not the spirit, was subjugated to his will....My spirit moved, cool and clean as a mountain pool, in realms he would never know" (Guinevere Trilogy, Queen of the Summer Stars). 

I don't think in the moment most of us make that connection that some part of the self remains untouched, but it is beautiful when that realization takes hold. One of the writers in a private writing group called The Haiku Room (135 writers so far participating with the goal of composing haiku daily), initiated by Nicole Galland wrote a haiku just as I was composing this blogpost that I felt belonged here for the way it sums up this concept. This is by Marsha Rosenzweig Pincus:

as his fist descends

her mind-body splits in two

one escapes the blows

In another feat of synchronicity, I contacted Persia Woolley while drafting up this post to thank her for the scenes she wrote. I read her Guinevere Trilogy just after completing the micro-movie Corridor to accompany a poem from November Butterfly focusing on Guinevere and her mother in which they get to enjoy a stolen moment alone together in the passageway between their bedrooms. After reading Persia’s trilogy, I was able to complete drafts of poems I'd started three years prior written from the point of view of Lancelot’s vision of Guinevere’s passing (after Mallory) and poems from Guinevere reassembling herself post rape (after Woolley). I ran a draft of this post by Persia as a way to thank her for the inspiration and had to include her rich and detailed response here for the look into her writing process:

“Your comments on my Guinevere were most touching. Very few people have ever noted the rape sequence, though it was the final thing that convinced me to write the story from her point of view. All serious Arthurian authors have the problem of how to explain her never having children. Rosemary Sutcliff makes Arthur impotent (as a result of horror at the incest with Morgause) and various other authors make him too old, etc. But that doesn't explain no offspring with Lancelot--both men aren't likely to be impotent or sterile."

"So it must be her. (One of the reasons she appealed to me was that she was a woman who had to define herself without children.)  Then I ran into references, both in my family and in books, of women who spiked terrible fevers following rape and were rendered barren because of the ensuing Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. Voila!  Fits perfectly into the story and I felt it gave me permission to explore many other aspects of the story from the more human point of view, such as her being the step-mom to Mordred and watching the dreadful tension build between Arthur and his son, yet being unable to sway either one of them.” -- Persia Woolley

Persia put years of research (over ten, I believe) into her historical fiction. Here is a beautiful interview with Persia about her process, conducted by Sharon Kay Penman.





Dora McQuaid
Photo & Mural by Michael Pilato

I also want to mention three new young poets--new to me--but already fiercely dear to me for the shared interest in transformation. I heard the first two poets read at AROHO's summer retreats (2011 and 2013 respectively) and came away impassioned to track down their work. Dora McQuaid is an amazing poet activist, (working on reissuing her book, the scorched earth, with accompanying CD). Her website bio reads in part, Dora's "activism addressing sexual and domestic violence led to her portrait replacing that of Sandusky's in the Penn State Mural."

Lauren K. Alleyne

Lauren K. Alleyne, (Difficult Fruit), prefaced her reading by speaking of the importance of finding a new vocabulary for housing the experience of sexual trespass, advocating a move away from oversimplified victim terminology. Here's an excerpt from Eighteen, the poem from which her collection's title is derived:

The longing is to be pure; what you get is to be changed. 18, we will carry our dark, we will

birth ourselves again and again; we will
tend our gardens, harvest the difficult fruit.

I love how Lauren leaps from the line "what you get is to be changed" which belongs to poet Jorie Graham, how she takes us to the next level of transformation: that "we will carry our dark, we will / birth ourselves again and again" in order to "harvest the difficult fruit."

Lauren has forever changed the way I will think about any act of violence or sexual trespass. Her language empowers what we usually label, "the victim." I love this bold movement into the realm of action--gardener, harvester.  Forget purity--thriving is about taking the reassembled self into present time as someone capable of confident forward motion. I hope you'll read the rest of the poem here at Split This Rock. Here's an additional link to The Project Room, out of Seattle, with a description of the entire book, Difficult Fruit as well as an Interview with Lauren conducted by Nicelle Davis at Connotation Press. (July 7, 2014 addition: Chris Rice Cooper writes about the mentorship of Alleyne and the shaping of this particular manuscript: The Chemical Reaction Within Lauren K. Alleyne.)





Laying Lain by Sandra Hunter

Sandra Hunter, novelist and photographer, works with images in nature and juxtaposes them with text. The combination is haunting--I found her images profoundly healing. I'm thinking of her image of water trapped beneath the ice, Laying Lain (Special Merit Award, Northern National Art Competition, Sept 2013), which for me depicts a frozen psychological state many of us would recognize--a combination of hibernation and rumination. A pilgrimage of naming and labelling, attempting to sort out what happens in the aftermath. 

Around the rim of the dark blue oblong window of water, surrounded by snow, Hunter places her wordplay: just ....lie... shut...As viewer, you must keep going around the periphery of the water window to follow the "narrator," as you/she hunt/s for the rest of the wholeness of thought: lies, lie down, in, slain...where you also find the relief of up, though there's a sense of not being able to get lift yet. Which feels accurate to me as well.

Night Radio by Kim Young

When Sandra heard I was writing some sister poems that dealt with the vulnerabilities of surviving adolescence, she directed me to Kim Young, author of Night Radio (Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry), which tracks, among other things, an incident that befell the poet's sister. Sister poems psychologically double the pain, in my mind, where obviously two pasts and sets of traumas intersect. Add to that the extra layer of sorrow, projected responsibility, that comes with not being able to protect a sister, let alone oneself. 



Kim Young

Kim's book gave me permission to consider writing without fear or apology as her take on process is ultimately redemptive. Here's a line from an interview posted at The Coachella Review: "My hope is that the story-beneath-the-story in Night Radio is more about coming to believe in the world again, rather than the details of the trauma," A Conversation with Kim Young, by Kari Hawkey. 

Sheila Hageman's memoir about adolescence and her choices that lead to her former life as a stripper, Stripping Down, considers the entire equation that goes into the creation of self-esteem. Sheila looks at the complicated roots of desirability: how we see ourselves internally and externally in the grip of an image-driven culture where women's bodies are continually exposed across venues. She does a beautiful job structurally, alternating scenes in strip clubs with pivotal scenes of childhood linked to an attitude or belief about herself, her father, her desirability.

Sheila Hageman

She takes us with her through each strip club's doors and into the changing rooms where we witness meeting the managers, her first dance, and the clipped conversations between dancers. Writing the memoir allows her, with the advantage of hindsight, to ask stark questions of herself: what if she had allowed herself to become friends with the other strippers, for they were as complicated and potentially conflicted as she was.  The memoir also grapples with cancer, depression, and identity forming interactions with both parents, including the effects of secrets and psychological pasts of both parents. Moving her awareness into activism, Hageman wrote a second book, a non-fiction guide, titled The Pole Position: Is Stripping For You and How to Stay Healthy Doing It.

Something about Sheila's book provoked a sadness in me on behalf of both sexes and the intensity of the ever-present opportunities for mistranslations, especially during adolescence. So many conflicting messages from society, styles of communication, inherited patterns of belief and assumption. Lately I've been thinking about bridgework vs. polarization. There's so much to heal. On a visit to my father's house last summer, while recording new music and poetry, I noticed some newly hung black and white drawings.

Artwork by Peter Pryputniewicz

Turns out they belong to my brother. When I asked him if I could use one in a post I was writing about revision, rape and the roots of trees, could he tell me what the artwork was about, he said with his usual kindness towards my various obsessions, "Of course. The image is one in a series of drawings I did based on a potential video game. The image was meant to represent a token, one of a number of suits of mastery a gamer could accrue (such as sun, moon, wind, iron, butterfly). From the butterfly suit, the concept of this token has to do with grounding the force of an opponent's attack, hence the roots surrounding the figure." Of course it was from the butterfly suit, I am in the cocoon and have butterflies on the brain. Thank you, Peter.  

I love the transformative quality of the life we get to lead as writers. Sure, the finished writing takes its place separate from us in the market. But we are changed by what we write. Rebecca Mead (New Yorker.com) quotes Jennifer Wiener (in relation to body image and writing) as saying she wrote her first book “almost as a life raft to the girl I once had been” (Jennifer Wiener's Quest for Literary Respect).  I feel that way sometimes about the poems I'm writing now--not only the poems for November Butterfly, but the new sister poems.

Sculpture by Sandy Frank

I think of Robyn’s boat (at the top of this post unfired, below, in color and fired), not as your typical goodbye send off or Viking funeral to separate from the Guinevere obsession, but as a means of giving Guinevere a seat in the boat so she can enjoy the view from the chair as she floats down the river. Or maybe that chair is for the girl I was back when trees mattered more than boys.


Additional Links of Interest:




Fired Boat Throne, Robyn Beattie
Photo Barbara Hoffman

Forthcoming Poetry:

Peer Counselor, forthcoming in Chaparral (Founding Editor, Kim Young). I'm very excited about this online publication which showcases the work of Southern California Writers.

Here is a link to one of Joan Swift's poems (author of The Dark Path of Our Names) listed on her website:

Victim

New Perhaps, Maybes  with Liz Brennan (collaborative prose poetry)

Spell:

Perhaps to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, is to effect a magic.

Read rest of Spell.



Gilgamesh, aka Red
Photo by Robyn Beattie

And here's one for all you cat lovers who are also inadvertently fish lovers, or maybe you have a husband who can't help but come home with beautiful Beta fish he's taken pity on...as if coming home to a noisy house with two cats and a Husky, three children, and a storm of impending potential accidents is any better...In Beta's future: surviving the transfers from counter to counter (on those days my husband feels the fish--affectionately known as Red, or Gilgamesh, to differentiate him from Blue, the first Beta, who floated to the surface after his water was changed too rapidly...is the best we can surmise--is lonely...where, occasionally he finds himself the centerpiece at the dinner table, at risk of bits of macaroni or meatloaf slipping off the spatula on way to the 7 year old's plate).

Once again I have written a description that rivals the length of the poem itself. Here's the first line, which has nothing to do with fish...so be sure to go to Liz's site for the rest. And I gave you two lines, because Liz, writing in Sonoma County about Parsifal, must have a bit of the Arthurian bug as well. Robyn, partial to my husband's soft spot for Red, took the accompanying photo.

The Unasked Question:

Perhaps like light itself – now particle, now wave – the unasked question lives in between, just out of reach, leading us both out into the world and back into the depth of ourselves. Like Parsifal we ride forth, throats dry, with bugs whirring about our heads.

Read rest of The Unasked Question

Transformative Blogging:

I closed out the year at Transformative Blogging with a beautiful, in-depth interview with Heather Blakey (source light behind Soul Food Café and many other wonderful, innovative projects): Blogger as Weaver: A Solstice Interview with Blog Mage Heather Blakey. Thank you Heather for giving so generously to us in this interview.

I close by asking how you travel...on foot? By boat? And let's say you had a throne in your boat. Who might wish to sit there? Do tell...

July 1, 2014 addition: 

In this California Journal of Women Writers interview with Sandra Hunter, conducted by Karen Lively, scroll down for a description of how Hunter makes her text photographs, the magic of letters appearing one by one and how this image/letter work impacts her writing process.

May 31, 2017 additions: 

Words as Spiral Path: Tania Pryputniewicz on Owning Your Story, a close look at healing process and the writing of poetry, addressing three poems from the colleciton, November Butterfly: "Absolute Power,"  "Peer Counselor,"  "(25) Floors Up on Open Balcony in Seattle Guinever Fails to Appear."

Michelle Wing: off the margins; interview and 5 poems: "Reading Cixous in Translation," "Things That Stop My Breath," "Body on the Wall," "That One Time, Word Play"