San Diego Events for Writers September 2015

Blogging 101: In-Person at San Diego Writers, Ink    

As part of San Diego Writers, Ink, “Fall for Writing” Weekend Conference, I’ll be teaching Beginning Blogging on Saturday, September 12, 2015 from 11 am to 12:45. Today is the last day to take advantage of 10 sessions for $120 member/$140 non-member or purchase each session for $20 member/$25 non-member if you do it before the deadline on Thursday (today). 

Classes offered over the weekend include:

Blogging 101 with Tania Pryputniewicz
Making Memorable Characters with Lisa Kessler
Creative Writing with Jenny Lane
Want to be a freelance writer? with Kevin Brass
Prose Poetry with Ron Salisbury
Brainstorming with Kim Keeline
Scrivener with Kim Keeline
Memoir Structure with Marni Freedman
Scene with Mark O'Bannon
Goal Setting for Writers with Jill G. Hall
Writing Memory with Judy Reeves

Here is the course description for my Saturday workshop:

Blogging 101: It seems everyone has a blog nowadays. It is a prime way for people to share their ideas. And whether you simply want to write a blog or use it to promote your new book, you need to plan how to do it. More than half the blogs that are started are abandoned within a year. Don’t be a statistic. This intro class will help walk you through the steps of launching a blog and keeping it for the long haul. Social media and promotion will also be touched upon.

I also invite any of my former students to come and write with us—I’ll be passing out my usual worksheets but I’ll have some new ones for you. We will write from new prompts in the hat! As you know, the hat always comes to class!

Here is the link for more information and to register for the Fall for Writing Conference.

Creative and Professional Excellence: A Radical Reframe with Jeffrey Davis

Also coming up in late September, Jeffrey Davis of ArtMark will be coming to give an interactive talk as part of the Tracking Wonder Tour on Thursday, September 24 from 6:30-9:30 p.m. at San Diego Writers, Ink at Liberty Station. You may reacall I blogged for a bit as part of an amazing pack of creatives Jeffrey had assembled for us last December. I am so thrilled to have a chance to meet him in person and to hear him speak; he’s changed the way I think about the possibilities for transforming my relationship to my own business artistry. Here’s a link to more information regarding the Tracking Wonder San Diego Tour evening, Creative and Professional Excellence: A Radical Reframe on eventbrite; cost to register for the evening is $20.

Phoenix Seahorse by  Tania Pryputniewicz

For a more personal look at the kind of work Jeffrey inspires, here are links to the posts I wrote as part of Quest 2015; you'll find links to other creatives I met and have come to love at the bottom of these posts: 


Stopping to Start

Blogging and the Shadow Self

Phoenix Eggs in the House of My Father 

A Pilgrim Path and Mentor Dolls 

A Nightmare, A Sky Boat and Serendipity

A Phoenix Seahorse and a Heart Door 

Trusting the Noir Fairytale

Shadow Bags and Joan Swift's Dark Path of Our Names.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Wheel of Archetypal Selves: Moon to Universe: On-line with Story Circle Network

I’ve had a beautiful year of deepening my relationship to the Tarot alongside my students. My upcoming Tarot/writing course starts on September 21, 2015 and covers the last four Major Arcana cards from the Moon to the Universe. No prior experience with the Tarot necessary; all level of writer welcome. Do join us! Full course description here at Story Circle Network; or you can access the course description here on my website along with links to writing I’ve posted before in relation to the Tarot.

Mother Daughter Writing Exercise and Call for Guest Posts

Photo Robyn Beattie

I have more to say about August’s trip to Ghost Ranch; I’m always grateful for the two-year gap between A Room of Her Own Foundation Retreats. It takes that long and longer to reap the harvest. Here’s a post about the retreat and how Maxine Hong Kingston’s book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, inspired a writing exercise about the Secrets between Mothers and Daughters. I hope you’ll feel inspired to write in response to the exercise; we are also looking for guestposts generated by the exercise at Mother Writer Mentor.

Tarot for Two: July and August Cards of the Month

Mary and I continue to co-blog at Tarot for Two. July brought us the Chariot and the Prince of Swords respectively.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Mary on the Chariot:

…I’m very happy in general that my card of the month was the Chariot—it’s saying something good, is pretty much all I’ve managed to take from it in my thinking so far.  Which is often the main thing I look for when I pull a card—is it a good card, or is it a bad card or a boring doesn’t-say-much-of-anything-good-or-bad card?...

Tania on the Prince of Swords:

…We don’t see the rider’s eyes, but the horse’s are blue, wide open. His muzzle and profile line meld into front hoove line. Four propellers, transparent as dragonfly wings, spin on top of the knight’s helmet and are labeled North, South, East, and West. Where is this duo headed with such purposeful haste?

Read the Rest of The Chariot and the Knight of Swords.

August’s card of the month: The Death Card. Period. For both of us:

Tania on the Death Card:

…So Mary and I both pulled the Death card in August as our card of the month. That’s never happened—pulling the same exact card--in the three years we’ve been on this project. And wouldn’t you know, it’s the juggernaut of cards, the King of Kings, the Arcanum Alejandro Jodoroswky and Marianne Costa in The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards call the Nameless One and Lady Frieda Harris paints with vibrancy, such gleeful fervor emanating from her Thoth deck’s dancing skeleton with his black scythe and black bucket helmet tilted askew.

Mary on the Death Card:

…I figured that since the cards gave both Tania and me Death by way of playing a little joke on us, I probably wouldn’t have much that related to it all month.  But I was wrong.  I’ve never had a card of the month that talked to me as much as Death did this past month.  The whole month was like one big ending/cleansing/cleaning up of the past and there was some real death in it too. 

Read the Rest of The Death Card and the Death Card.

My thanks to Robyn Beattie for her beautiful photos and artwork, as always, my gratitude for her collaboration.

The Eggs of Summer: Camp, Cooking Class, Santa Fe Poetry Reading

I’m marking summer by kid camp, for sure, as mothers of littles do. First year all three of mine are old enough to go to Junior Lifeguard Camp and adrenaline-crazed enough to attend back-to-back sessions! Out they trundle, reeking of sunscreen under the Coronado June gloom mist. Back they come under blue skies to litter every inch of the house with sand, sprawling their sun blonde limbs across the living room rug. Fridge door opens and closes like a windmill, shelves emptying faster than we can replenish them. Even the broccoli!

We are still celebrating my first poetry book’s release, November Butterfly (Saddle Road Press, November 2014) so I’m reading in Santa Fe at Garcia Books in August with poet friends Barbara Rockman and Robyn Hunt. Here’s a facebook page for the event:  Facing Forward, Looking Back: Poetry Reading. Then I’m off to attend A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Summer 2015 retreat at Ghost Ranch as the Marg Chandler Fellow (an honor).

Here’s a poem for you from the new poetry manuscript I’m writing based on an Illinois commune I lived on during my childhood. I wrote “Cooking Class” when Tweetspeak Poetry put out a call for poems on the theme of blue jeans back in April. At the mercy of universal bad timing usually reserved for the opening of car doors (into those of adjacent cars), I had just sent my only blue jean poem into circulation.

Tweetspeak (via Twitter) introduced me to a writer named Amy Billone; thanks to some mutual “egging” on of one another, we both managed to draft poems you’ll find in Tweetspeak’s e-book, Casual: a little book of jeans poems and photos (available for free during National Poetry Month, 2016, or if you want a copy sooner, you can become a Tweetspeak supporter at the $15 level, details for the e-book Casual here). The book is edited by L.L. Barkat, cover image by Susan Etole.

Cooking Class, Illinois, Mid 70s

Along her immaculate counter: silo

of red-handled sifter, bright order

of silver spoons, lemon bales of butter

softening in late winter light. In cupboards

her husband the carpenter built, bars

of Baker’s Chocolate, dried figs, quartered

apricots and Mason Jars of brined harvest.

A good cook puts up her hair, wears

apron, stores flour in freezer to keep

Boll Weevils out, uses shells of her egg

as a tool to separate yolk from white.

She also wears dresses, I learned,

when for donning jeans, she informed me

she no longer wished me to babysit. She cited,

over the phone to my mother, the effect

it might have on her son, the kind of wife

he might choose, the man he’d become

as I chased him on my hands and knees round

living room’s glass table she refused to move

when he was born. He’d learn, she’d said, he’d learn

soon enough, where he stopped and she began.

I love that writing prompts have the power to take us into the labyrinth of memories. You never know which one will light up. Try it—just write “blue jeans” across the top of a blank page—and let me know what happens.

Reflecting back on the situation of the poem--50s values prevailing in the 70s--I can see that I emerged relatively unscathed emotionally from being fired for wearing jeans. True, I loved the little boy and the babysitter snacks rated. I’d lose out on some pocket change.

But there was a hidden gift, a form of ferocious love us firstborns covet. My mother slammed down the phone and raged to my father in the next room while my body tingled with collateral adrenaline. Seconds later she stormed in and said, “You are not going back there. Ever. No one tells my girl she has to wear a skirt.”  One of her finest Mother Bear moments.

Related Links:

I solicited a beautiful post by Amy Billone at Mother Writer Mentor about the writing of her blue jeans Haiku for her son, My Baby Boy’s Jeans. 

All the photos in the post are by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie.

A Vasectomy Sonnet, Fathers in the Birth Room, and a Poetry of Fatherhood Exercise

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Only you’d joke through a vasectomy, / 

Sitting up to view the clamp pinching shut / 

Your vas deferens (of its lobe fished free… / 

—excerpt from Paybacks, by Tania Pryputniewicz, A Year in Ink, San Diego Writer’s Ink Anthology, Volume 8

A Year in Ink,San Diego Writers, Ink Anthology, Volume 8 is now out and available for purchase (prose editor Dean Nelson; poetry editor reg e gaines, cover image by Margaret Larlham). The anthology holds 145 pages of prose and poetry and includes work by Jill G. Hall, Jim Moreno, Judy Reeves, Ron Salisbury, Anitra Carol Smith and 43 more authors. 

In his introduction, poetry editor reg e gaines offers this fabulous reminder regarding the role of a poem’s title: “It must allow the reader freedom to imagine, not serve as a sign leading to an exit ramp.”  What great advice; I’ll be revisiting all of my poem titles with that in mind! 

The anthology also includes the rest of the vasectomy sonnet, Paybacks, for my husband; he’s fond of saying that if I would just write poems about him, the clouds might drop their bounty of dimes upon our roof. We’ll see!

I was going through a “forms” frenzy when I wrote Paybacks. I also loved the challenge of writing about a male process from a female perspective. The sonnet form doesn’t leave leeway for rambling; it forced me to radically distill the memory of witnessing the vasectomy. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was already composing the sonnet back then, but I certainly couldn’t shut off my poet’s mind that day. There I was, sitting at the foot of the operating table, nursing our third child while the doctor snipped and cauterized: “proof of potency”—our baby--colliding with “bye bye potency”—stitched husband. I had the best view in the house, just as my husband had the best seat for the labor, birth, and follow up episiotomies we endured for our three children. I figured I owed him a “witnessing” or two.

Fathers in the Birth Room

Photo by Royn Beattie

I take it a bit for granted my husband could (and did) accompany me in the labor and delivery rooms; I can’t imagine not crushing his hand through contractions, not having him there as each infant crowned. But when I asked my own father about his access a scant fifty or so years ago, he wrote:

When you were about to be born I was allowed in the room during labor, but they kicked me out before the actual birthing.  This was at St. Luke's.  When I took your Mom to the hospital in Rochester for your brother’s debut I expected the same… and was dismayed when I wasn't even allowed to go up to the maternity ward!  I remember standing outside the elevator in shock as the doors closed.  I can only imagine how that felt for your mother.

By the time your little sister came along I was allowed in the delivery room for the entire event.  St. Luke's again.  I remember a very festive atmosphere. Your sister looked luminescent, silvery and pale violet.  Her voice sounded like music.  The doctor quipped, "$250, please!" (the fee for prenatal care and delivery at that time). We all found that hilarious!

What about you? Would love to hear in comments from other mothers and fathers. I also set about to find poems about tubal ligation. Do you know of any? Do tell, in comments, if so.

Poetry of Fatherhood Exercise

Here’s a related writing exercise for you to try from my Poetry of Fatherhood Class:

Consider landing on a parallel metaphor for the experience of circumcision or vasectomy, as Thom Ward does in, “Vasectomy” (May 1996, The Atlantic online). Brainstorm a list of potential metaphors and images before you start writing to jumpstart your process. If neither of these experiences figure for you, your father, or your child, write about any other tangentially related experience located in the male body that has to do with fatherhood (“couvade” syndrome, for example, vicarious pregnancy, a term from the French term “couvee”—to hatch).

I also used a poem by Greg Wrenn, “Circumcision” (I was not able to find it online; it was published in Crazyhorse, 2011). See also a poem by Phillip Appleman, Vasectomy.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

The Moon and The Devil at Tarot for Two

Mary Allen and I continue to co-blog at Tarot For Two. Here are excerpts from our Card of the Month writings. Both of us refer to the Thoth deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris, and the Rider-Waite deck, painted by Pamela Waite Smith:

Tania on the Moon Card:

I think of Frida Kahlo’s bathtub portrait (What I Saw in the Water, also known by the title, What the Water Gave Me) painted from inside pain’s hyper alert state of slowed time. We could say it is Frida’s Moon map, memories bobbing on the surface of the water, stilled for her to see. And for us to witness, looking over her shoulder, blessing vicariously her story and our own buried sorrow wicked to the surface in resonant sympathy.

Mary on the Devil Card:

The Devil in the Rider-Waite deck has harpy feet, bat wings, and a reversed pentagram on his forehead, and the Devil in the Tarot of Marseille (this was the first tarot deck I ever had, bought on a whim when I saw it at a bookstore, the images turned out to be way too abstract for me to even begin to make heads or tails of) – that Devil has boobs, a face on the belly, eyes on the knees, male genitalia, and its own set of bat wings.  What could all these images possibly be telling me during the last month?

Read rest of our post: The Moon and The Devil.

Saddle Road Press News:

ARCs of RuthThompson’s new poetry chapbook Crazing are here; here is a review by Jendi Reiter; you'll find two poems from the chapbook there as well, "Mary Speaks" and "Losing the Words." I love the cover image and the poems by Ruth Thompson (my editor for November Butterfly at Saddle Road Press). We will be running a poem from Crazing at Mother Writer Mentor shortly and I will share the link with you when it is up.

November Butterfly in Santa Fe

Facing Forward, Looking Back is the title for a reading I’ll be giving with two other poets and dear friends: Barbara Rockman and Robyn Hunt. We will read on Sunday, August 9, 2:00 p.m. at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia Street, Santa Fe. The event is free and open to the public. I'll be reading from November Butterfly; here's what you can expect in Santa Fe:

Sharing a passion for the journeys of family, marriage and poetry’s power as renewal through myth and story, the poets will read from collections that transform individual quests to make sense of love, grief, trauma, history and an unsettled world. They will read from their recent books as well as from new work.

Here are bios for my fellow readers Robyn Hunt and Barbara Rockman:

Robyn Hunt ran offset printing presses and owned a bookstore in California before returning to her native Santa Fe where she is Development and Communications Director for Las Cumbres Community Services, serving families with social emotional challenges and disabilities. She obtained her degree at California State University at San Francisco and on the streets of that city in the seventies. Her poems resound with the landscape and language, images and rhythms of northern New Mexico.  Robyn blogs at “As Mourning Doves Persist.” Of her debut collection, “The Shape of Caught Water,” Jimmy Santiago Baca said, “These poems strum the lyre strings of the heart to conjure olé music.”

Barbara Rockman has taught poetry and generative writing workshops since 1999 when she earned an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts after a career as an arts education program developer and theater director. Her widely published work has received numerous prizes and her collection, “Sting and Nest,” received the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award. She is workshop director for Wingspan Poetry Project, bringing writing classes to Esperanza Shelter for Battered Women.  A frequent collaborator with artists, her poems have accompanied installations and exhibitions. Of her work, poet, David Wojahn says, “She has the capacity to wrest celebration from our failings, sorrows, and confusions.”

Related links:

To see more of my poetry movie collaborator's photography, visit Robyn Beattie's website.

21 Zs for Lisa: Omen Hunting at Yo El Rey Roasting

Photo by Robyn Beattie
Detail, Marvin Lipofsky mold blown glass

Today’s poem is for Lisa Rizzo. I challenged her to write me a poem using the letter z. Read her response, “Firenze Poem.” Here’s mine. Please add your “z” poem in comments…bring on your “z”…

Omen Hunting at Yo El Rey Roasting

                                    For Lisa Rizzo

Tart brine of a dozen fresh ground coffees

cuts Calistoga’s fog. We sit at salvaged gate

turned table, its slats varnished red and inset

with maze of silver zero rims of a typewriter’s

harvested keys minus striker arms and metal

host. A stanza eleven lines thick zigzags counter’s

horizontal face on a full-length chalkboard we quell

the urge to erase, revise. Lazy regulars stand

obscuring all but opening phrase, Wanted

to work on the poem... straight from some Writers’

Workshop post-reading party. I’m thinking of Hafiz:

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house.” At my elbow,

the letter “z,” and next to it, alongside all my reasons

for not writing today, the “Shift Key.” Surely

I’ll walk out of here with my one “z” name--

my two “z” friend Rizzo with hers--changed,

grey zipped to the sky, all former griefs

unswathed from gazebo of memory like Isadora

Duncan’s silk scarf unspooling from axle, neck,

body moving in reverse back to morning’s dreams,

azalea dye pooling in our upraised palms, long may she

sleep past noon. Here, neither czarinas of dance

nor Jezebels, we remain profoundly ourselves.

Our reflections in a storefront layer a painting

of a scarlet stallion running diagonal as a mirage

or a zither, a hundred violet mares on verge

of bursting past his blazing mane to reach zenith first.

Last line of stanza 4 is from the poem, Your Mother and My Mother, "The Gift," by Hafiz, tr. Daniel Ladinsky.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Related Poetry News:

I will be reading from November Butterfly in Santa Fe with poets Barbara Rockman and Robyn Hunt on Sunday, August 9 at 2:00 p.m. at Garcia Books, 376 Garcia Street, Santa Fe.

I will also be attending A Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2015 August Retreat as the Marg Chandler Fellow. In addition to teaching a studio hour, I will be offering poetry feedback in conjunction with Tarot Readings (Tarot as Poet’s Mirror). I will blog more about Tarot Poetry consults shortly. They are tremendously fun and I love generating poetry prompts based on the cards specific to the poet's project.

Photos are by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie with the exception of the "Shift Key." The photo at the top of the post is a detail from a larger work by Marvin Lipofsky and is mold blown glass, cut, sandblasted, acid etched.



And do add your "z", "shift", or "coffee shop" poem to comments if you wish.



Link to post with original "z" poem invitation: June Gloom and the Letter Z

June Gloom and the Letter Z: Poetry Tour of the Forms Class

Stop looking for God in the sky; let’s find him on Earth. On the Tower Arcanum, from The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, Alejandro Jodorowsky with Marianne Costa

To counter the overcast “June Gloom” we wake to in summer on Coronado Island, here’s a red table from a darling coffee shop, Yo El Rey Roasting, that I visited in Calistoga this winter. I love the embedded typewriter keys in the table and the fact that the coffee shop doubles as an art gallery/literary venue. In the window was a copy of Michelle Wing’s Body on the Wall, and all across the base of the front counter, a chalkboard covered in words…words…words…

In the early morning February fog, I sipped coffee with my poet friend Lisa Rizzo, our writing notebooks closed in front of us. Often separated by miles, we agreed we could just revel in one another’s company and save the morning writing for another time. 

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Today finds Lisa writing in a blue-tiled room in Sorrento and Naples, blogging and posting photographs at Poet Teacher Seeks World. I’m raising my home brewed coffee to you Lisa, and to the letter “Z.” Write me a poem from Sorrento using the letter “z”, and I’ll write you one from here!

In celebration of fogginess, or at least its’ enchanting pewter hue, here’s a photo of a bull nestled in my wedding veil by my poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie. 

The moment I saw the bull I wanted to write a fairytale for him. But it’s been done: I’m thinking of "The Brown Bull of Norrowa," starring a princess (tossing her three glass balls into the sky) and a snorting bull (uprooter of trees); I first found the tale in The Tapestry Room, A Child's Romance by Mrs. Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921) and illustrated by Walter Crane (1845-1915); published London: Macmillan and Co., 1893. 

There’s a night ride for which the princess is a willing captive on the back of the bull and a lonely Tower toward which they ride that houses riddle of bull’s past. 

Illustration by Walter Crane

Here’s an illustration by Walter Crane from my pale blue volume (all the way from England, gift from my Aunt) which sits on the top shelf of my roll top desk. I’m living with the bull…listening…he’s in the dreamfield…making his way towards inevitable poem or tale or translation.

The Tarot Tower

In synchronicity, for the Wheel of Archetypal Selves Tarot class I’m teaching, we are in Tower week, living our way to an understanding of the Tower card. For me that means writing some Haiku, blogging at Tarot for Two with Mary, and comparing Deck interpretations as I did earlier this month with the Temperance card. I love this line by Eden Grey from A Complete Guide to the Tarot: As we learn to transfer the Life force from the imagination (moon) to the activity of the conscious (sun), the will is developed and the imagination purified so that in pouring from the silver cup to the golden one we lose nothing. You’ll remember that this card features a guardian angel dipping her toe into a river, two cups in her hands between which stream an elixer. I began to think of the cups as the hearts of two lovers, the elixer a form of love:

Illustration by Walter Crane

Angel wields two cups

Ash blue elixer between

My chalice: my heart.

Lover then, you form

The second cup, Art’s angel

Brutal, winged, firm, kind.

Cupless my two hands—

All I’ve done or craved blessed by

Silver mobius.

Guardian witness.

Seer, keeper of secrets

My turn to translate.

Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms

If you are looking for the kinship of writing and translating your experiences in poetry with others, join me for six weeks of sheer poetry play. We will try our hand at haiku, haibun, sonnets, sestinas, and more in person at San Diego Writers, Ink, located in what I think of as one of San Diego’s best kept “secret gardens” of art and chocolate…during Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms we will be writing upstairs around the corner from Chi Chocolat and Con Pane Rustic Breads and Café and all manner of art studios and shops (including Moment Bicycles sure to please triathletes like my husband). Poetry class runs from six Thursdays starting already this coming Thursday, June 25 ($180 SDWI members, $216 non-members). We meet from 10-12 noon in Inspirations Gallery in Liberty Station. Sign up here: Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms; for further links and a full description, visit my website.

Story Circle Network Reviews November Butterfly

My gratitude goes to Susan Schoch at Story Circle Network for this latest review of my poetry collection November Butterfly:

If there is truth to Pryputniewicz's voice, and I believe there is, it is in her search for the beauty to be found in dark places. Certainly her title poem reflects that, as she takes "...a butterfly with a frayed / wing pinned living / to the windshield" and makes the gesture of liberating that wounded yet vibrant creature. It is a liberation of all our wounded selves and our sorrows.--Susan Schoch

Read rest of the review here: November Butterfly by Tania

Yo El Rey Roasting Counter Poem

Pryputniewicz 

To read other reviews and for information about how to order November Butterfly visit my website.