Phoenix Eggs, Beginning Blogging and The Wheel of Tarot's Archetypal Selves

Phoenix Egg Doodle

I’m always looking for ways to grow as a blogger, which in addition to my passion for the form, is the main reason I teach blogging.

To that end, I’ve joined the Tracking Wonder #Quest2015, a hands-on virtual journey structured so creatives meet online in public and private forums under the stewardship of Jeffrey Davis to consider prompts by twelve visionaries during the month of December.  Quest questions urge us to ruminate intensely on goals, intentions, hidden saboteurs, and life-dreams in order to manifest a potent 2015. Many of us are writing and posting our answers to our blogs. And doodling! Phoenix Egg 3 is part of a new habit I've committed to daily: a morning color doodle meditation focused on Sacred Joy (I'm posting to a board on Pinterest)...thanks to one of the prompts I'll describe below. 

I joined #Quest2015 mid-stream, so expect me to still be considering some of December’s questions in the coming months. Here is a list to the three posts I've been able to formulate at Transformative Blogging; at each post's end, you’ll find links to the posts of fellow questers, many whom are formulating wildly fertile answers across mediums from visual art to music to quilting to written and recorded reverie:

Vine O Joy Doodle

On Stopping: Stopping to Start, based on the following prompt: We often think too much about adding new things, when the source of a lot of our growth is eliminating old things. What do you need to STOP doing in 2015? And what do you need to do to make that STOPPING more than an intention?—Charlie Gilkey of Productive Flourishing and best-selling author of The Small Business Life Cycle.

On our Dark Side: Blogging and The Shadow Self, based on the following prompt: Which emotions do you feel most guilty about having? Afraid that others might find out? How could you spend this year trying to be open to the emotional window that allows you to be courageous? It rarely feels good right before we do something courageous, but these moments are the most meaningful and treasured. Todd Kashdan (author of The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why being your whole self – not just your good self – drives success and fulfillment(Hudson Street Press) with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener as well as Curious? Discover the Missing Ingredient to a Fulfilling Life (Harper Collins).

Photo by Robyn Beattie

On Sacred Joy: Phoenix Eggs in the House of My Father, based on the following prompt: How could you make moments of joy a sacred priority in 2015?
What forms will such moments take?
Doodle, draw, photograph, or write your way into these questions.. –Sunni Brown of the TED Talk “Doodlers Unite!” and leader of The Doodle Revolution – a global campaign for visual literacy and also the name of her new book. Sunni is also the author of Gamestorming.

I also couldn't refrain from posting this new beautiful image by Robyn Beattie, my poetry movie collaborator, that she sent me after reading that post. To me, this image looks like a liquid rendition of the inside of a phoenix egg. The art braid continues....

November Butterfly Update:

Photo Robyn Beattie, Cover Design Don Mitchell

I have taken a poetry prompt break to play on #Quest 2015, but you can find links to all eleven of the prompts written for the iconic women in section one of November Butterfly (just released this November, 2014, by Saddle Road Press) here under my About page. I will resume writing prompts in the new year.

And please do continue to check my Events page for updates and information about the writing workshops and readings I’ll be doing on book tour in 2015 in support of this first poetry book. We are working on an event in March 2015 for which we show a handful of our poetry movies at the invitation of Sonoma County’s Occidental Center for the Arts in Northern California. Robyn Beattie and I will be inviting the artists featured in the poetry movies to bring their corresponding physical artworks to the event that night to display. It should be an amazing celebration of collaboration. As I mentioned earlier, check my Events page to stay in touch or to suggest venues. I’d love to hear from you.

January Classes

Photo Robyn Beattie

Beginning Blogging in person through San Diego Writers, Ink

I am excited to be offering an ongoing series--Beginning to Advanced Blogging--over the course of the year in 2015 (in six week installments); should you sign up, know this is a marvelous way to be part of an ongoing trajectory towards your blogging goals for inspiration, support, and new ideas over the course of 2015.

This first course in January offers beginning bloggers the chance to create material to launch a blog or to recalibrate an existing blog through completing a series of writing exercises and inventories. We look at blog platforms and blog technique; we will also preview the Web for examples. We brainstorm together, create content, discuss image use, and refer to a checklist towards blog launch. Students will emerge with sample posts and a map in hand for how to proceed in the future.

Course runs Tuesday nights, 6:30-8:30 p.m. January 13-February 17. Cost is $180 for members of SDWI and $210 for non-members. No prior blogging experience necessary.

For full course description and to sign up, visit Beginning Blogging

 

Luna on the Wheel

Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Fool to Hierophant

This is online class is offered through Story Circle Network. Using the Major Arcana as a focal point, we make connections to the archetypes and our past and current experiences. In turn, we mine these writings and others inspired by the imagery of the Tarot to help revise existing writing projects or inspire new ones.

We will focus, one card per week, on the first six cards that make up the Major Arcana progression (from the Fool to the Hierophant), connecting our own past experiences to aspects of each archetype as well as answering weekly questions based on definitions assigned the cards by Tarot scholars. We will also read excerpts of published work based on the Tarot. Students will keep a Tarot Journal for the duration of the course, noting any experiential synchronicities occurring during the week in relation to the cards under study.

Course runs January 12-February 23, 2015. Cost is $192 for Story Circle Network Members and $240 for non-members. All level of writer welcome; no prior experience working with the Tarot necessary.

For full course description and to sign up: Wheel of Archetypal Selves

T's sand dollars

New Perhaps, Maybe with Liz Brennan: Evolution

Liz and I continue to play at Perhaps, Maybe with prose poetry. Perhaps this will be the year you write her a Perhaps of your own, or take her up an responding with a Maybe to her Perhaps--do contact her if you’d like to play; she is always looking for collaborators. Here is a teaser from each paragraph of our latest collaboration:

Perhaps the bicycle, perched in evolution between horse and car, allows a girl the modest means to ride…

Maybe the bicycle wheels, larger than dinnerplates, spin off wordlessly into the air as they continue to evolve…

Read the rest of Evolution here.

I hope this time of year affords you some moments of peace, stillness, and joy with the family of your choosing...I am feeling blessed and grateful to have so many portals of communication across which to play. Bless you for listening and for engaging with me here at Feral Mom, Feral Writer in 2014. 

Shower Juggling, Faux Appendicitis, and November Butterfly’s Book Launch

"Working" on 3D planet project, midnight

Everyone is breathing under my roof, more or less. Except for me—I’m inadvertently breath holding again as we near November 1 release date for my first poetry collection, November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press)…I’ve been in Ninja marketing mode, sending out press releases and review and event requests as soon as the kids catch the bus to school (and even when they don’t). By night, starring as Encyclopedia Brown on steroids, sniffing down the missing homework trail, tearing up the Silver Strand for 3 am runs to CVS for licorice, frosting, and $20 dollars worth of other assorted candy (should you, say, have forgotten your Model of a Cell project were due tomorrow…)

...or taking my turn as Harriet Home-maker, peeler extraordinaire of blueberry fruit leather off the ceiling. If you cram enough frozen blueberries in a blender and froth them for long enough, they form a temperature differential primed to explode the blender lid all the way up to the ceiling, at least under the supervision of my teen willowy 5 foot something I-just know-she’s-taller-than-I-am-now daughter…

…which is why we added Blender to the list of appliances not to use unless mom is home. Though a mother’s presence doesn’t necessarily deter dangerous activity…in fact, later that day, I was able to detect, over killer-bee drone of vaccuum, the ER scream from far side of bathroom door—

Diffuse Moons Robyn Beattie

…which turned out just to be my son reacting to the nasty crack of curtain rod over his back having downed it while foot juggling a tennis ball in the shower. I’ll take credit for inspiring the multi-tasking part. The rest, I’ll bequeath to my triathlete husband. We saved ER for the following week when the juggler came down with a right side stitch that kicked in after a X-Country meet followed by soccer practice.

With a middle child’s sense of timing, he waited twenty-four hours, full moon casting its light across the carpet just before bedtime, to tell me the pain hadn’t subsided and was in fact, he told the advice nurse, (the clincher), moving into his chest. One doctor on duty, 30 people in the waiting room, an IV, CT scan, and seven hours later, we were on our way back home just as the sun came up, armoured with the admonition to “drink more water” and a good dose of the queasies from listening to everyone else’s catalogue of injuries from scorpion bites to falling off stools to broken jaws.

So that’s where I’ve been…while squeezing in a bit of blogging up poetry prompts on the main site. If you are too far away to come to a writing class or November Butterfly workshop, stop by the website and write with me virtually….I’m using November Butterfly’s Table of Contents to create writing exercises based on the poems in the book…you can access the ones I’ve gotten to so far here:

Marilyn, or No Girl Sets Out to Die

Sylvia, is it Sleep or Words You Miss

Amelia, Crossing for the Crossing

Jay DeFeo’s Rose, or Stein Cursived Hers on Her Ceiling for Alice

Sisters of the Orange, A Tale of Three Oranges

Lolita Wake! 
She Dressed in a Hurry (For Lady Diana)

Cover Photo Robyn Beattie
Cover Design Don Mitchell

November Butterfly Book Launch at San Diego Writers, Ink

Join me in person on Saturday, November 1, 2014 (Dia de los Muertes), at 2:30 for a one hour writing workshop, Writing Past Fear: Free Your Butterfly. We will write about our mentors and play with paper cutouts as a way to approach core stories we haven’t been able or willing to write about yet. The $30 fee includes a copy of November Butterfly. Or, just come out for the reading and book signing following the workshop, $5 suggested donation. (Register here with San Diego Writers, Ink for Free Your Butterfly workshop).

Sonoma County November Butterfly Book Launch

In Sonoma County, I’m launching on November 10 (Veteran’s Day) at Coffee Catz in downtown Sebastopol. Catz is a fabulous coffee shop near and dear to my heart. I escaped after the birth of my first child on Fridays to write; in fact we held the baby shower for that first child (blueberry blender girl) in the back room behind the velvet curtain. I return to teach the writing workshop described above at 2:00, followed by free book signing and reading.

November 11, I’m thrilled to be reading in the company of my Saddle Road Press sisters, Ruth Thompson (Woman with Crows) and Michelle Wing (Body on the Wall) at Moe’s Books in Berkeley at 7:30 p.m. Reading and book signing event free of charge.

For more information about these three events, visit my Events page.

AROHO Fellowship Award:

It is difficult to celebrate this next bit of news when so many of my friends and fellow retreat participants submitted applications to these awards from A Room of Her Own Foundation. I wouldn't be where I am today without the love and support of the many women gracing my life as a direct result of AROHO's retreats. I am deeply grateful for this turn in the sun, and very honored, to have been selected to attend the 2015 AROHO Retreat as the Marg Chandler Memorial Fellow at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico next summer. 

We have a beautiful program waiting for us at the 2015 Retreat and Waves Discussion Series: Writing Against the Current with Waves Discussion Fellow of Distinction Maxine Hong Kingston. I still have my copy of Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts from undergraduate study days at UC Davis when I was lucky and brave enough to have troubled Kingston for a signature. I can't wait to hear what she has to say in 2015 and to bask in the inevitable fertile discussions fed by the minds of the AROHO women. 

Robyn Beattie Photo Assemblage

Related Links:

Bloggers in theTextroom: Alexandria Peary Defines a Lineage of Female Mentorship

Not just because we are featured in it—but also because of how interesting it is to look at women’s mentorship models over time, I absolutely love the in-depth scholarly article Alexandria Peary, PhD, wrote, titled, Walls with a Word Count: The Textrooms of Extracurriculum (published by College Composition and Communication on the National Council of English Teachers' website last month). We blogged it up at Mother Writer Mentor where you’ll find a link to Peary’s full article. She draws some parallels between the practices of an editor of a 19 Century magazine titled Godey’s Lady’s Book and writer/blogger/editors at three sites (She Writes, Mother Writer Mentor, and VIDA’s blog Her Kind). Top photo is mine; the rest are by the amazing Robyn Beattie.

The Woman Warrior at 30: Maxine Hong Kingston's Secrets and Lies at Slate by Jess Row (2007)

Katniss Everdeen: A New Type of Woman Warrior A Radical Female Hero from Dystopia at New York Times by A.O. Scott and Manohla Durgis (2012)

Top photo is mine; the rest are by the amazing Robyn Beattie.