Unmasked Kicks Off a Beautiful Conversation

Kathleen, Renata, Lisa, Barbara, Tania, and Marcia at SOMOS

…between men and women regarding sex and intimacy. I am newly returned this weekend from New Mexico where we were blessed to read in Taos (at SOMOS) and Santa Fe (at Op.cit), six of us, in celebration of the anthology, Unmasked: Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After 50 (Weeping Willow Books). Given the polarized climate we find ourselves in at present (with Ford/Kavanaugh hearing leading to an FBI investigation this week) and my own stress-level triggered by the ongoing public conversation around sexual assault (see last week’s post if you wish), I was grateful to let down and laugh with my fellow readers and audience members as we shared poetry and prose about the range of ways we express ourselves when it comes to sex.

Tania at Op.cit Santa Fe

I also loved questions we fielded from men and women in the audience about how we can foster avenues for intimacy and ways we can view our ability to love one another through previously unimagined lenses. What portals have we never sought out before that might lead us to greater bliss? What unmapped and undiscovered ways of connecting might we explore at the edges of the familiar, known ways of relating? May the conversation blossom in person and in future books.

Pictured above are contributing author and co-editor Kathleen A. Barry, PhD, contributing authors Renata Golden, Lisa Rizzo, Barbara Rockman, yours truly, and co-editor Marcia Meier. We were blessed with some coverage by the Taos newspaper in the article Nothing to Hide that gives you a window into the process behind the anthology’s creation. You can order a copy of Unmasked at  Weeping Willow Books. And if so inclined, we'd love it if you leave us a review on Amazon or Goodreads. 

Poetry News

The Write Like You're Alive 2018 anthology, from Zoetic Press, is available for download for free here: WLYA 2018.

I love Zoetic Press for many reasons, but especially for their 30-day challenges. I create new work and meet new authors, as I did this past August when I had the chance to read at Bookshow in LA with Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, Laura Reece Hogan, Wendy Zimmer, Kevin Ridgeway, Joe Iraggi, Mathieu Cailler and Ashley Perez.

This year’s 30 day-challenge became a way for me to write poems for my mother (we lost her in January of 2018). You can find one of those poems for her here in the WLYA anthology; “Duck” appears on page 61. Gratitude goes to Lise Quintana and Kolleen Carney! 

And here’s your word cloud preview at a glance of the work included in the anthology:

Belle Plaine     heroin     fox     gossip     gunshot     puppetry     staples     dragon fruit         weddings     fever     spelling bee     lemonade     magnets     arcade     psychic     transgression     renovation     matriarchy     office     Oklahoma     rainbow     wheelchair     lavender     icepick     Apollo     baseball bat     shrine     power     homestead     talons     guitar     bees     Dan     workshop     insect     toes     bus     Miffy     teeth     subway     witchery     discontent     reefs     nuns     envy     torpedoes     Persephone  

Poetry and Tarot Writing Classes

There's still time to sign up for Poetry Basics (we start tomorrow, Wednesday, October 3) or to join Tarot for Joy (we start next Tuesday, October 9 at 11 am). My online classes promise a deep dive in community with joy, compassion, love, laughter, and the serious work of writing and coming to know oneself in good company.

Love and Spirituality: Trusting Your Inner Compass

Unmasked: Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After Fifty

What does a love life look like for women after fifty? Lover or no? Online dating or no? Love of friends eclipsing lover love? You’ll find fifty-three views in a new anthology, "Unmasked: Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After Fifty." I’m honored to be included, writing that I first posted here on Feral Mom, “Sex, Hammers and Self-Care in a House with Three Children.” 

Editor Marcia Meier will give a brief introduction, followed by those of us reading from the book: readers Lisa Rizzo, Barbara Rockman, Renate Golden, and yours truly. 

Editor Marcia Meier answers a few questions about Unmasked over on the SDWI blog.

Come out if you can tomorrow night (Saturday, October 7th) to San Diego Writers, Ink over at Liberty Station 5-7 p.m. for the reading and signing and refreshments.

Trusting your Healer’s Compass: Amazon Wisdom Keeper Van Tuyl

As I keep working slow and steady on writing prose about an Illinois commune I lived on as a child, I’m reading memoirs voraciously—for inspiration, for strength, for joy. I met Loraine Van Tuyl on-line last year and fell in love with her forthcoming memoir, “Amazon Wisdom Keeper: A Psychologist’s Memoir of Spiritual Awakening,” which comes out at the end of this month with She Writes Press.

In “Amazon Wisdom Keeper,” Loraine anchors us in the physical landscape of her native Suriname, the fertile green and heat a backdrop for her childhood experiences and family lineage of teachings (a quality of light and heat that prepares Loraine for later trials when her deepest visions are questioned). To escape the turmoil of the changing political power-scape in Suriname, Loraine’s family moves to the United States where adolescence’s lessons arrive through Western belief systems. Intuition’s early lessons came through love, and later, through college psychology classes with their fixed ways of approaching healing as well as spiritual groups with rigid understandings of the ways to access healing power.

The gift of Amazon Wisdom Keeper is the intimate look at the very push and pull of different ways of believing and healing and what it takes to undergo rejection and somehow find the strength to trust one’s internal compass to navigate life, to know when to stay, when to let go, when to change mentors or groups. Van Tuyl reminds us that in our deepest moments of personal and spiritual rejection lie the seeds for self–love. We learn that by confronting our obstacles and trusting the process, we have the potential to awaken beautiful parts of ourselves otherwise left untested and dormant. Thank you so much Loraine, for your beautiful book. For more information, here is a link to a short video about Amazon Wisdom Keeper and a link to Loraine's page on Goodreads.

Keep your eye out for an interview with Loraine later this month--I will post the link here when it is live. 

**October 19 update: Here is the link to the interview: Amazon Wisdom Keeper and Spiritual Awakening.

Sex after Fifty, The Empress, and Tarot for Joy

Cover Photo, Unmasked

With two teenagers in the household and one tween, when am I not aware that I’m aging? Does it mean I’m not allowed to have anymore fun? Of course not! Now is the time to play more than ever. I won’t be bringing my children to this event although they do star in the non-fiction essay I’ll be reading as a contributor to Unmasked, Women Write about Sex and Intimacy After Fifty, an anthology of essays and poetry co-edited by Weeping Willow Books’ publisher Marcia Meier and her colleague, therapist Kathleen Barry. The collection explores the physical and emotional aspects of intimacy and sexuality after age 50 in pieces written by women from the United States and beyond.

Here’s what Gloria Steinem has to say about the collection:

“Sex for women after fifty is invisible for the same reason that contraception, abortion, and sex between two women or two men has been forbidden: sexuality is supposed to be only about procreation. This lie was invented by patriarchy, monotheism, racism and other hierarchies. Sexuality is and always has been also about bonding, communicating and pleasure. Unmasked helps to restore a human right.”

         -- Gloria Steinem

The reading and book signing, hosted by Weeping Willow Books’ publisher and editor Marcia Meier, will be held on October 7 from 5-7 p.m at San Diego Writers, Ink, so pencil us in on your calendar! I will share more details as we get closer. For more information, visit Weeping Willow Books. 

Poetry: Ron Salisbury, Peter Krumbach and Yours Truly

I’ll also be reading poetry in a couple of weeks for A Turn of the Verse at Meraki Café along with poets Peter Krumbach and Ron Salisbury; you’ll really enjoy their poetry. Ron’s work is rich, humble and often humorous while poignant and I love Peter’s masterful gems too. I will be reading from the commune manuscript as well as new poems I’ve written since then. I’d love to see you if you can make it, Friday September  8^th from 7-9 p.m., Meraki Café, 1735 Adams Avenue in University Heights.

Back in June I promised a sound file for “Dropping in the Eight,” which was published in SDWI’s A Year in Ink, Volume 10. Here’s the link: Dropping in the Eight, MP3

Tarot News: Tarot for Two Podcast

I jumped in to this new podcast adventure with writer Mary Allen at Tarot for Two. With our usual sense of humor and our growing library of Tarot reference books at hand, we look at the images and themes and colors and and give you our laid back impression of how the cards relate tangibly to us in present time.

Here’s a podcast in which we ask: How can we find meaning and joy simply by looking at images printed on paper? In other words, is a Tarot deck just a deck of cards?

Tarot for Two: Is it just a deck of cards? 

And we began to look at the Major Arcana one by one:

Tarot for Two: The Hanged One

 Tarot for Two: The Empress

Tarot for Two Cards of the Month: Even though we’ve started podcasting, we haven’t given up on our practice of writing about the cards. How do you define fortune? Which aspects of your life bring you a wealth of joy? Does writing help you see past poverty as a form of currency, as I discovered last month?

Tania on The Wheel of Fortune:

All month long I glance at the Thoth Wheel of Fortune card on my desk. Behind the pale green wheel in the center of the card, one sees lightning bolts, their top jags ending in stars. “The stars exploding into lightning bolts represent the experience of awakening to the possibilities that can turn our lives in more positive and expansive directions,” writes Angeles Arrien in relation to the Wheel of Fortune. The quote accurately reflects what I’m experiencing as I take scenes from my childhood that I first described in poetry and develop them in prose for a new writing project of mine.

Read the rest of Tania on The Wheel of Fortune 

How do you experience personal power and the joy of your will translated into action? How do you hold the world in your hands? Mary writes about the Two of Wands in relation to her writing practice:

I guess I can say that my month was about power brought down to the earth and made personal.  The way I do that is by writing, which as I see it involves connecting to some universal creative power floating in the air sort of like electricity, connecting to it and bringing it to earth and making it personal, through writing. For me this involves seeing and noticing and doing something with what I’ve seen and noticed, capturing it as precisely as I can, with all of its detail and meaning, and mirroring it back to the universe as I write about it. 

Read the rest of Mary on the Two of Wands

Artwork by Tania Pryputniewicz

Fall Writing Classes

Tarot for Joy: Fall Writing Class. Whether you are Tarot curious and new to Tarot or a life-long Tarot enthusiast, this course is designed to help you focus on love, light, and joy by writing about the joy cards in the deck. Love, Creativity, Prosperity, Clarity and Celestial support will be our focus. While we cast an eye back towards how we experienced the aspects of the card before, we also cast an eye forward towards what we’d like to invite into our lives and hearts. If you are interested or have questions and would like to know more about my particular approach to the Tarot, use my contact form to drop me a note and I will schedule you for a free simple three card layout reading over Zoom (or Skype if your prefer). Read the full course description here: Tarot for Joy.

Writing Through Fear: Free Your Butterfly:  Several years ago on book tour for my poetry collection, November Butterfly, I taught small two-hour workshops on the theme of writing core stories. I’m very excited to now offer two full seven-week course for which we use poems in November Butterfly and writing prompts in the accompanying PDF I’ve since created, Thirteen Writing Prompts Based on the Power and Creativity of Iconic Women Designed to Help You Write New Work From Multiple Points of View.

The PDF pairs beautiful stills from November Butterfly’s poetry movies with each featured iconic woman, multiple writing prompts, and links to additional writings and sources. My goal is to help you connect to your own mentors and invite you to draw strength from the ways they faced challenges as you prepare to write your own core story.

Questions we take up in this class include:

Who inspired you when you were growing up? Who do you consider to be the lighthouse women in your personal orbit? What have you learned from them that will shed light on your own story?

During this seven-week session, we read poems and selected writings about Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Amelia Earhart, Jay DeFeo, The Three Oranges Fairytale, and Lolita as a springboard to help you engage with writing your own work. For more information, feel free to reply to this newsletter. This online class starts September 5, 2017. Here’s the full course description on my website, Writing Through Fear: Free Your Butterfly.

Second Saturdays: Poetry Draft, Craft, Submit!

My Second Saturday morning San Diego in-person poetry workshop is a great place to keep your poetry writing practice going in a supportive environment. Class runs from 10 am to noon at Liberty Station in the art gallery upstairs. We always have room for a few more writers if you’d like to join us. In September we write to the theme of Livestock and Pets. Just bring paper, pencil, and an open heart and you’ll come away with prompt worksheets and some sample targets for where you might consider submitting poems for publication. In October we write to the theme of Omens. 

Sign up here for 2nd Saturdays: Poetry Draft, Craft, Submit.