Writers and Lovers Cafe and a December Book Giveaway Offer

Writers and Lovers Café arrived in my mailbox all the way from Taiwan, full of haiku, haiga, senryu, haibun, tanka, and tanka classics (edited by Tad Wojnicki--I wrote about his work earlier in Lemonade Stands and Writers and Lovers Café). In this slim and lovely debut volume you’ll find the usual favorite haiku suspects (moons and roses) but you will also find a wilder array of volunteers in the book’s word cloud from Ferraris to fruit, AA to sirloin, Auschwitz to flea markets, garlic to spiders, and castles to children’s handprints.

And it features a haibun by yours truly, Reunion, which attempts to capture the emotional fray of trying to right the disparate needs of a family of five reconciling after three years of weekend marriage. No slender lover pining under cherry blossoms—think peevish wife and preteen daughter on shore, and loose in the sea: the surfing husband and sons. An entirely different kind of pining. Or pinning. Some kind of defeat and attempted triumph. I have now written a description longer than the haibun, so I'll stop here.

Except to say my husband is singing in the shower..Yes, honey, I wrote this one about you. As I've mentioned on this blog before, whenever I get a poem rejection, he's famous for admonishing, "Was it a poem about me?!....No?...So write one about me and I promise it'll get taken..." There you go, I concede, more poems in his future. About him.

Here’s the back cover of this edition of Lovers and Writers Cafe listing an upcoming call for submissions just in case you have taken up a haiku challenge--for instance there’s a wildish group of AROHO women committing to writing a haiku a day starting in January; if you join me in that challenge,  by Tad’s haiku deadline here of March 1, 2014, you should have at last 60 new haiku. And what better thing to do with a series of haiku than to submit them to someone who will actually read and cherish them?

Additional Notes:

This edition runs $6 a copy plus $4 for international shipping; here’s the link should you wish to give Writers and Lovers Café to the haiku fanatic in your life. There you'll also find submission guidelines in a larger font.

Another amazing site celebrating these forms and more with beautiful galleries and video collage, with thanks to Liz Brennan for pointing me to their site:

Haiga Online; up this October, “Same Moon"


Book Giveaway:

I am teaching Poetry of Motherhood online starting January 6-January 31, cost is $125; in an attempt to entice you to register, I promise to send a copy of the anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories (Catalyst Book Press, 2009, ed. Jessica Powers) to the first two students who enroll (an $18 value). The anthology features an Introduction by Tina Cassidy, Afterword by Jessica Powers, essays by Ariel Gore, Amy Parker, Ann Angel, Ashini J. Desai, yours truly, and 24 more writing mothers.

The cover art features a block-print I drew, carved, and rolled out three weeks before my first child was born...you'll notice the ecstatic depiction of the mother despite crowning child...a giveaway of another nature that I had no reference yet for the serious work of labor. On the other hand, it rightly intuits the absolute joy of holding one's infant for the first time.

I hope to have the chance to work with you in January. Writers of all genres welcome as we use Fertile Source poems for inspiration but the form our writing takes varies by writer.

Lemonade Stands, Retreats, and Writers and Lovers Cafe

The very last week before summer vacation, my youngest took off his training wheels and we started biking together along the harbor ten minutes to school, fifteen if I let him swerve the yellows of the path's divider line (barring oncoming riders). My heart breaks, yet soars with him: he can go wherever his legs will take him, fast and furious away from me into the sandy dunes where the jackrabbits bound away from his silver spinning spokes, their dual pale pink bunny ears laced with those arterial red lines like freeways marked on the old fashioned paper maps we used to use.

Another first this week: a lemonade stand undertaken with his friend who lives down the block. Us mothers sailed towards one another with our plates of cookies, mine, peanut butter, hers, oatmeal raisin, to the tiny folding table with its fresh squeezed pitcher of lemonade, two folding chairs, a long pocket of change taped secure along the back border of the table cloth. Then, all too soon for me (when did I get this prone to tearing up?!) after the admonition about counting change, the other mom winks at me, the cue to slip away to let them run the show.

When I return an hour later, just the dregs of lemonade swill below the spigot, nearly impossible to drain into a cup, the folding chairs empty, sprigs of lavendar and purple daises flying, the boys wrestling on the corner lawn behind their stand. They spy me, straighten their shirts, caps, and race back to their chairs as my husband rides up on his bicycle from work just in time to buy the last cup and second-to-last cookie.

Other news, poetry news: I snuck away for a modest mini retreat with nine fabulous women last month, waking to group writing exercises, breakfast littered with conversations about words, stories, places to send work, drafts in progress, u-turns, left turns, and the profound swervings of writing together in the present moment. Which lead me away from blogging and back to writing poetry, salved by walks along the ocean, a bobcat the size of the heftiest of my former feral cats yawning on the front lawn, a buck with a full velvet rack. And the nightly walk between the three houses supernally black to the soft lull of one more conversation and a shared flashlight, the radiance of stars over us.

This net of like-minded women, their warmth, support and mirroring, prompted me also to send work out again, which means a haibun is forthcoming from Writers and Lovers Café (Fall 2013). The editor/poet/writer behind Writers and Lovers Café  is Tad Wojnicki (along with haiku poet Iyja J. Cabrera). Wojnicki also formerly ran Haiku Pix where I first came across his How to Ginko series of articles that contain beautiful illustrations and ideas for how to write haiku (check out the latest one, The Technique of the Opposites, and be sure to scroll down to also read The Zoom Lens Technique). 

And thanks is also due to Liz Brennan for introducing me, not only to Haiku Pix, etc., but to the haibun form in one of her online Nature Writing Classes.  She's currently teaching a poetry writing workshop titled Animals Make Us Human for Story Circle Network. Liz and I have also managed to stay busy collaborating at her ongoing prose poetry site, Perhaps, Maybe. Here are the links to the latest collaborations and their first lines (and remember to join her with a perhaps or a maybe of your own if you wish). To summer! And words, blessed words....

Your Child

Perhaps your child meant at first to come through my body...

Revision

Perhaps as a writer the desire to tell the truth haunts you, as it should, yet at the same time all past events over which you previously had no control are at last subject to your decisions, your revisions...

The Guest

Perhaps the body in sleep unburdens its flock of questions, like so many winged sirens, into the sky of dream...

Forever New

 Perhaps nothing is worth as much as what may replace it, when any given thing is only the first in a series of increasingly better things...

Photo credits:

Artwork on cover of my journal is by Paloma Estrada--I cut and paste her beautiful image of lanterns to my temporary notebook (from a brochure for the Coronado School of Arts) that I took to the Sea Ranch retreat where I fell in love not only with my retreat companions, but the sun, windchimes, cherries, hot tea, and birds nesting under the eaves.