2D3D Poetry Show Featuring Lady Di, Amelia, Nefertiti Photo Poem Montages

Photographer Robyn Beattie and I are very proud to announce that three of our photo poem montages were chosen to be featured as part of a 2D3D visual poetry show hosted next month by the LH Horton Jr. Gallery at San Joaquin Delta College (Center for the Arts, curator Chandra Cerrito). Authors included as point of departure for the artwork range from Ovid, Rilke, Dickens, Coleridge and Tolkien to more contemporary authors such as Neruda, Ashbery and Alexandra Teague.

Robyn and I will be driving to Stockton for the opening reception on October 4^th, from 5-7. We are thrilled to have this chance to share our work with a larger audience and excited to meet the rest of the exhibiting artists.

 In lieu of the haul to Stockton, the entire show can be viewed via the website.

Our montages chosen for the show: “She Dressed in a Hurry, for Lady Di,” “Amelia,” and our most recently finished montage (just last month), “Nefertiti Among Us.” “Lady Di” and “Nefertiti Among Us” feature my father on piano performing the work of Scriabin and Bartok while “Amelia” features the voice of Lori O’Hara and an original guitar score written and performed by Michael Greenberg.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, while I’ve been somewhat (joyfully) confined to the domestic monastery, Robyn’s burgeoning life as an artist and photographer means we have beautiful crossover and opportunity to include works by other artists as she ventures out into the world with her immaculate eye and records a trail of where she’s been for us to harvest.

Featured within the photo poem montage “Nefertiti Among Us” we have an amazing mummy mask by E. McK. Filmer, dolls by Margaret Keelan, and a detail from Michael Cookinham’s painting, “Mummy Dreams.” “Amelia” contains artwork by Loreen Barry (a frail butterfly and markings we borrowed to imply hieroglyphics) as well as the bronze airplane sculpture and shadow of the same by Monty Monty.

Robyn and I are mid-process creating new montages for a series of poems based on the imagined life of Guinevere as well as a montage to accompany a poem based on the Italian fairytale, The Three Oranges. I hope you’ll stop by the gallery site, either in person or via virtual tour, to celebrate with us and check out the range of artistic response to poetry.

Announcing Website Launch, Upcoming Classes and Blogging Book Project

In the kingdom of hope there is no winter--Russian proverb

This winter I spent a good deal of time working behind the scenes on preparing a new website, the latest in a series of steps along the way to developing my life as a professional writer. With my youngest child finally in school, I spent this last year devoting time to editing, interviewing, cross-posting and promoting the work of other writers, all valuable and worthy work I intend to continue. But with our family at a financial cross-roads, perched on the cusp of choosing one city to live in so we can potentially forgo the two city insanity, it is time for me to fund that writing life.

Additionally, I began to feel Feral Mom, Feral Writer’s usual focus (on the changes of heart and hearth as I write and raise children) became diluted with posting announcements for classes and forthcoming published writing. So I’m attempting to allow Feral Mom her due and let my other site be the new hub for published work, classes I’ll be teaching, and a new blog I’ll be starting in August about the transformative blogging book I am in the process of writing for women bloggers.

Teaching a subject, of course, always pushes one to grow; teaching Transformative Blogging continues to be rich. In the networking world, I’ve come across the work of writer and blogger Nick Thacker (thanks to research expert and blogger Marlene Samuels). I bought Thacker's book and am working my way through it (actually answering his questions, putting in the footwork to look around the net), as he provides very tangible ways for understanding the business side of blogging (something I am definitely not savvy about) as well as how to grow one’s roots and connect to others. Here’s a link to his blog: Nick Thacker and a link to his book on Amazon ($4.99 on Kindle, and you'll see I wrote him a review) Building a Blog for Readers: 101 Questions to Ask Before you Launch your Blogging Empire.

While Thacker and I share some similarities in terms of questions and the inventory approach to the blogging process, I find the worksheets I'm using and developing for women cover what I'd loosely define as emotional and spiritual aspects of the blogging process. But I wanted to spend the next year inviting women bloggers to work with me so that what I offer extends past my own potentially myopic view of what we face as women bloggers. I invite you to come along with me--I will be blogging at my new site (www.taniapryputniewicz.com) and offering sample worksheets to subscribers starting in August.

But until then, I have worked to make the site visually appealing, so I hope you'll visit. You’ll find links to the projects I’m enjoying, including the collaborative photo poem montages. Robyn Beattie and I just completed our fourth montage, “Nefertiti Among Us,” a companion montage to “Nefertiti on the Astral.” We are also very excited to have submitted our montages to a gallery—a goal we have long had in the back of our minds. I’ll be sure to let you know when we do finally find ourselves with a gallery opportunity.

I’m so grateful to be a writer, today, now, given the many ways we have of connecting (as a writing mother, I’m thrilled we have the venue of online teaching). I get so much pleasure out of coming up with on-line classes, and then having the chance to work with my students. You know the saying, that the map is not the terrain--I start with the course map, and we veer where we need to go given who arrives to take the class. I’m excited about the scope of the International poetry workshop, as well as the new class for couples recovering from parenting (class structure will include the usual sharing of poems in progress, but the secret assignment: writing a poem we won’t share, to be mailed to the better half by Valentine’s Day).

Over at Mother Writer Mentor, here’s the forthcoming class list:

Around The World in 30 Days: Reading and Writing the International Poetry of Motherhood and Fatherhood: September 10-October 5th, 2012

Transformative Blogging for Writing Mothers: November 1-November 30th 2012

Send Me a Letter: Love Poetry for Couples Recovering from Parenting: Jan 8th to February 1, 2013

Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood: April 1-April 26th 2013

Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Fatherhood: May 6-May 31st 2013

For a blog post about the support I’ve received from other women writers and a link to an interview with writer Julianna Baggot: Mother Writer Mentor Blog post by T

Or to go directly to full course descriptions or to sign up: Mother Writer Mentor Workshops.

Look forward to our writing lives crossing. As always, we are ever on the lookout for guest posts written by writing mothers about any aspect of that dual role.

Rescue of Ophelia and Nefertiti Among Us live at Stone Canoe, Online

Painting by Christine DeCamp

I’m happy to announce two poems up at Stone Canoe, Online. I’ve given you the url to the table of contents, in hopes you’ll give the whole line-up a read, for such line gems buried in the poems of my fellow contributors as “the sculpted mothers/who stood on the lawn amid maple leaves/ in fetal denial” (Nikolae Babuts, Lockerbie), “farm roads are clothes on other people” (Paul Doty, Pink Barn Eye), “jonquiled moon” (Gayle Elen Harvey, In Praise of the Dark), “Color your hair, darling, if you must” (Jay Rogoff, Dyeing), “calling the girl I was” (Kathleen Tenpas, The Calling), “Often I’m as helpless as a sleeping cowboy” (Thom Ward, And There is Beauty in Cracked Sidewalks).


Poem 1: The Rescue of Ophelia was inspired by one of Christine DeCamp’s paintings. I lived with the image in my house for several years before writing the poem (an earlier blogpost chronicles this process). Between then and now, DeCamp embarked on the journey of creating her own tarot deck. Ophelia now features as one of these cards. Visit DeCamp’s site to learn more about this beautiful project.

Poem 2: Nefertiti Among Us under-girds a parallel project as well. Robyn Beattie and I are fast at work making the companion photo poem montage, featuring Steve Pryputniewicz on the piano with another Bela Bartok selection and as always, Robyn’s mesmerizing and intricate photographs (featured in our three prior movies).

The print version of Stone Canoe just arrived in my mailbox; last weekend waiting for my daughter to emerge from an Easter Egg hunt, I sprawled out in the grass under a no-cloud sky and immersed myself in a rich field of poems, interrupted only by the occasional misjudged hops over my midriff (the two sons, 6 and 9, heavy enough now to efficiently knock the wind out squarely out of me…"just…let me…

…finish…this stanza…")

(after I’d said to my husband, “Why don’t you put away the iphone and just Be With Us…”

…the 6 year old slyly remarked, “Mom, why don’t you put away that book…and…

 …just Be With Us…”)

Boats of Mercy and the Gift of Journaling

...Look,/boats of mercy/embark from/our heart at the/oddest knock...
Kay Ryan, The Niagara River (2005), from "Chinese Foot Chart"

So when a wave recedes, and you’re standing there with your ankles moored, it’s best to close your eyes against vertigo…or risk losing your balance, confusing your body’s point of anchorage and giving in to the headlong return to the sea.

That’s how it has felt this month to write against the rest of my life and its responsibilities.

Over hazelnut decaf mocha, I discussed happiness with two of my favorite mom writer/artists. (See Jessica Powers' recent review (Can women be smart, empowered, AND happy? ) of Ariel Gore’s latest book, Bluebird: women and the psychology of happiness, on this very subject). Are we to only be fulfilled by our children? On the other hand, I asked my friends, “Will our kids think we are narcissists for pursuing our writing?” We each hoped not, because the few hours away are worth the recharge (the ability to return to our families having tended to ourselves). We each hoped we could deepen our artistic/writerly endeavors, while mothering our children with love and poise. Is it possible? To do both well? That’s what I’m after; it isn’t easy.

The retreating wave feeling descended this month for a number of reasons:

1) the holidays—though we had harmony at our Thanksgiving table and did not, after all, as was suggested in this week's NY Times article (Food, Kin and Tension at Thanksgiving), resort to playing “cruel comment” Bingo, which you win by running into another room to dial a friend with news you’ve heard a row’s worth of wretched, time-worn remarks from family members. I love my family and love time with them; fitting everyone in becomes the mind-scramble, on top of the pandemonium of the kids loose from school and schedule.

2) changes in my husband’s schedule for the coming year

3) my tiny laptop (seven years old) finally crashing (was it the frayed, duct-taped power cord? No, said the employees at Radio shack, in their loyal, customer-ethical way, both talking me out of buying their $100 power cord. “Try moving everything using a flash disk”, they suggested sagely. Tilting the greenish line-warped laptop screen just so once the kids and the husband were safely snoring, I salvaged my files).

4) loss of a writer friend (see last post)—lovely Barbara Robinette Moss, 54, artist, writer, in full bloom with her work. Over the last ten years, while she bravely battled her illness, she furthered her work and her skills, and had the time to look at whatever essay or poem I mailed off to her. Every time I talked to her she had a new conquest: “just finished a screenwriting course in New York,” “took an acting class,” “just opened an art-gallery with my Duane,” “will be teaching in Taos this summer.”

Inspired by Barbara’s daring, I am starting a new project for the New Year—poetry recordings with music. As soon as I learn how to get the right widget on the blog, how to get the microphone to talk to my computer, transform the wave file to mp3 etc, I will be posting these new collaborations—poetry set to piano music with my father Steve. We are looking at the Egypt series—debut poem, “Nefertiti Among Us.” It isn’t that I’m giving up on the world of print or on-line journal submissions (though these poems have been passed on three times so far) it is just that I don’t want to wait to play any longer.

I have kept a journal since I was five, and when life gets hectic, that is often the only connection I have to my writing. When I am feeling tired, when that retreating wave feeling comes and I fear I will never finish writing the words I am meant to write in this lifetime, I tend to feel journal writing is not enough. But I’m coming to see one’s writing truly is a mosaic, and it doesn’t matter if you write words down on a candy wrapper, in a journal, as a prelude to a poem, call it what you will, you do not know where it might end up years from now when you finally figure out where it belongs. Francine du Plessix Gray speaks to this in her essay “Black Mountain: The Breaking (Making) of a Writer” from the Collection Adam, Eve, and the City.

du Plessix Gray writes: “by 1926 I had two children. I lived in deep country and in relative solitude, encompassed by domestic duties. The journal was becoming increasingly voluminous, angry, introspective. The nomadic tomboy, finally denied flight and forced to turn inward, was beginning to explode. One winter day, I felt an immense void, great powerlessness, the deepest loneliness I’d ever known. I wept for some hours, took out a notebook…(p. 331).” She goes on to describe how the re-workings of those writings became the first chapter of Lovers and Tyrants, and how her mentor Charles Oslon had encouraged her to faithfully keep a journal. I can relate to the intense feeling of isolation and motherhood she describes, as well as the power of steady journaling. Inevitably you reach the core, your potential.