October Poetry News

Photo by Jamie Clifford

Extract(s) Interview: Three Questions

Thanks to Jenn Monroe at  Extract (s): Daily dose of lit, an interview is up based on the poems in the Camelot Section of November Butterfly:

The manner in which Guinevere haunted me, questions of sentimentality, and the way my husband found me among other topics covered. Here's an excerpt:

Guinevere found me again just after graduate school in the heartland, when a childhood friend proposed to me. He saw Sir Edmond Blair Leighton’s drawing, “The Accolade” (which we construed to depict Guinevere knighting a kneeling Lancelot) in my home, which I’d brought home from the crystal and gem store where I worked part time in Iowa City. He playfully suggested that we marry in costume. What poet could refuse?

Read the rest of the interview here: Three Questions, Tania Pryputniewicz  (Oct 2016 update: I've re-run the interview here on my main site: Thirteen Prompts for November Butterfly and Three Questions.

Excerpt(s) also ran Veil, Veil II, and Transport from November Butterfly in May of this year.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms, In Person at San Diego Writers, Ink

This class is a joy to teach and according to my students, a joy to take; please do join me for this four-hour workshop coming up:

10-2

Tuesday October 20, 2015

$60 members, $72 non-members

Do you haiku? Ever written a haibun, aubade, or villanelle? Want to try your hand at a sestina or a sonnet? During this one-day workshop we will fearlessly and playfully write our way towards working drafts of as many of the forms as we can.

We’ll start with the deceptively simple but evocative gem of haiku. Then we’ll breathe into the slightly pithier prose lead required of the haibun with its haiku chaser. Next up: dawn songs (otherwise known as aubades) for a love lost or left at sunrise. And then, hearts astir, we turn to the gift of intricate form and the unusual word choices form often invites. We will draft sestinas, sonnets and villanelles.

To sign up and read rest of course description visit Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms

Poetry Movie Screenings for November Butterfly in Sonoma County

My poetry movie collaborator Robyn Beattie will be presenting a film screening of five of our poetry movies as part of the Guerneville Library Fall Art Show that opens Friday, October 2 at 3 p.m. Robyn will be screening our poetry movies from 6:30-7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 7 and Wednesday October 14. Robyn will read the poems, show the movies, and discuss her images. Movie titles:

She Dressed in a Hurry, Lady Di

Amelia

Mordred’s Dream

Thumbeline

The Corridor, Guinevere to her Mother

If you are unable to attend the screenings, you can access the movies and learn about our collaborative process on my main website: Photo Poem Montages. Guerneville Library is located at 14107 Armstrong Woods Rd., Guerneville, CA, 95446.

Coronado Writers Workshop

Just got the heads up that the Coronado Writer's Workshop is this weekend, as in tomorrow. For more information, try this link: 2015 Coronado Writers Workshop.

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.