Tarot Butterflies, Poem Disorder, a Call for Butterflies, And Not Saying Goodbye to Feral Mom, Feral Writer

“Why do people make so much fuss about butterflies and never give a thought to the creatures out of which butterflies grow? It is the natural form of things that is always the most important…"  --The Lady Who Loved Insects (Tsutsumi Chunagon Mongatari, tr. by Arthur Waley)

November’s cocoon descends with its woolly promise of sleep and dreams backlit by cider and brisk walks along a grey-skied ocean….ensconced in winter coat and hand-made scarf. I was on the verge of saying goodbye to this blog (which this December, turns six years old) but I hesitated long enough to see its arc, where it has brought me, the place it gives me to listen, speak and most of all connect to others of like mind. I’m not ready to let it go.

In fact, I want to celebrate it and all of the heart to heart connections it brings. For fun, check out the very first post…which has garnered no more than 5 page views: The Desk. And contrast that with Truth or Dare at a whopping 1158. I’m not much one for numbers, but, I’m pleased to have readers. And frankly not upset to see I’m still amicably flying under most radar as I acclimate to the thought of having my first poetry book published.

Years ago in Iowa City I traded tarot readings with poet Corinne Stanley (here’s her poem Daughters at Prairie Wolf Press). As we shuffled the cards, we talked about aspirations for our writing lives. She asked me to choose an image: anything, an animal, plant--she would improvise and set the cards down in the corresponding shape. “Butterfly,” I said…and she was off and running, setting out a trail of tarot cards in the pattern of wings and a thorax graced by a long curving tail streaming like wake behind a boat in water or an airplane passing through clouds.

The last thing she said to me was, “Just make sure when the time comes, you take your time. Don’t rush.”

With book publication facing me next year, Corinne’s voice returns. In the generous feedback from readers of early versions of my poetry collection, November Butterfly, is a reassuring flood of warmth about individual poems, but an emerging question about order and cohesion. You’d think as a poetry editor and lifelong writer, I’d be able to see. But I can’t.

So I’m slowing down to listen to the work itself. Barbara Ann Yoder writes about this in her post, How to Get Your Book Written under the subsection, Let Your Manuscript and Process Show You the Way. This idea of book as voice or entity is a fairly new metaphor for me, but I’m hearing it also in the marketing world: see Alexis Grant’s post here on treating the books you write as a client, Insights About Digital Products That Changed the Way I’m Building My Business.

Seeing one’s writing through the eyes of trusted readers brings the work’s metaphors into view. Sandra Hunter (novelist and photographer of haunting snow and waterscapes with text) asked me, What do you want your butterfly's journey to be? Which in turn lead me to ask, What is a November Butterfly?  In honor of November and the collection in progress, I’m posting the poem the collection’s title revolves around...by way of introducing an image project I hope you'll join me for below:

November Butterfly

It’s easy to love the sun

and the roses it fires,
the blood cardinals
flying over snow,
three black horses
running midmorning
in the rain,
a blue heron
on a downed tree
in the river’s mist.

But what of tar fissures

on back-roads off the grid,
a liver sheened reptile
clambering out of the ditch,
cold rims of hubcaps,
headlights of a car
commuting home, a voice
two states away on the radio,
a butterfly with a frayed wing
pinned living to the windshield.

It’s easy to love some women,

emanating green, moonskinned,
quiet, enchanting, etcetera,
as sunlight
through the undersides of leaves.
Winter in the thighs,
we hibernate in rooms they’ve left,
and pray they’ll return, notice us,
or let fall
some butter from their palms.

I wish I were a flower,

or the maker,
to mend you.
I held out my finger--
not a stick--
and up you grappled,
unfurled a tunneled up
tongue,
for one last taste,
or to ward me off

So easy to muck the translation

no common language—
that gap between the self one loves
and the self one fears.
I can’t fill out your wing,
but I can look you
in the unblinking amber screen
of your eye,
be with you,
and set you on this leaf.

 --Originally published in The Dickens and forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in 2014.

 Call for Images
 

And so one interpretation is that a November Butterfly is ephemeral but stunning...something you do right by, simply by witnessing despite attendant sorrowful fragility. Something out of season that captures your attention, its beauty waking you up even if momentarily. Even if the initial impetus to stop and pay attention is based on a difficult encounter.

I’m sure I’m not alone experiencing either literal November Butterflies or metaphorical ones. I’m collecting images of my own for a Pinterest board I wish to start in December, but in the meantime, I’d love to know: what are the November Butterflies in your life, in our world? Send me an image and a few lines about how the image captures the essence described above for you and I’ll string them together in a post for this site. And they don't have to be literal butterflies...surprise me...

In the meantime, I’m working on hearing the manuscript's order of poems. Weigh in, please, in comments, my fellow creatives. How did you arrive at your first book's order? Or disorder?

As it stands, the poems based on iconic women (Diana, Nefertiti, Amelia, Jeanne d'Arc, Guinevere and others) make up three quarters of the project (you've heard me talk over the years about making the movies and the sculpture fun that accompany some of these poems). Motherhood gave me a bridge, a means of stepping inside of these women, even if briefly, to inhabit the public knowns of their narratives in order to intuit/imagine private emotional forays of lesser known aspects.

And surprisingly, writing those poems lead to new work in a wildish tour through the kind of adolescence many of us go through…that is apt to leave you if not with one wing, a frayed wing, for much of adulthood (I wrote more on this subject in a forthcoming post Lost Wings, Hesitations,and Outgrowing the Metronome  (link updated Jan 13, 2014) for Suzi Banks Baum this month when we traded—you’ll love her Motherhood as Portal to Joy: Threads of a Creative Life, or "What’s Good for Mom is Good for All of Us”) at Mother, Writer, Mentor.

In my case, unlike the butterfly pinned to the windshield and set on a leaf to expire in the poem above, I got a second chance. Through writing. So I’ll stop complaining. Maybe I’m suffering from a good dose of perfectionism…and I know the manuscript will find its way (in 2014) especially with the help of the beautiful circle of mothers, writers, artists, and friends I found here on Feral Mom, Feral Writer.

Flight will be short (or long), unsure (or steady), fraught with unknowns (or familiar). Wind, rain, and sun in the future. Risk it! Should I? Would you? Tell me, please do. Say something before I continue to list my fortunish cookieish phrases. And bless you, thank you, for being part of this feral flight with me.

Additional Links:

Photos are the intellectual property of and are all by: Robyn Beattie

While looking up sources for The Lady Who Loved Insects, I discovered a wonderful storytelling site: bilingual storyteller, Megumi: celebrating diversity, critical thinking, and diversity. Megumi has some great resource lists—here’s for example one titled, Strong and Resourceful Women List  in which she suggests tales that provide “a break from helpless and beauty-centered Cinderella stories.”

And of course Liz Brennan and I have not been idle over at Perhaps Maybe (where I continue to hope one of you will come out and play with us).

Here are opening lines for:

Red Rose

Perhaps we see a rose as red, yet the one color in which the eye sees it dressed is the very color the rose rejects... Read the rest of Red Rose here.

The Hummingbird’s Complaint

Perhaps the hummingbird, when still, juices the morning complaint... Read rest of The Hummingbird's Complaint here.

The Lesser Shorebirds

Perhaps my love for the namers rivals my love for you: be you godwit, whimbrel, or dowitcher…Read the rest of The Lesser Shorebirds here.

Lemonade Stands, Retreats, and Writers and Lovers Cafe

The very last week before summer vacation, my youngest took off his training wheels and we started biking together along the harbor ten minutes to school, fifteen if I let him swerve the yellows of the path's divider line (barring oncoming riders). My heart breaks, yet soars with him: he can go wherever his legs will take him, fast and furious away from me into the sandy dunes where the jackrabbits bound away from his silver spinning spokes, their dual pale pink bunny ears laced with those arterial red lines like freeways marked on the old fashioned paper maps we used to use.

Another first this week: a lemonade stand undertaken with his friend who lives down the block. Us mothers sailed towards one another with our plates of cookies, mine, peanut butter, hers, oatmeal raisin, to the tiny folding table with its fresh squeezed pitcher of lemonade, two folding chairs, a long pocket of change taped secure along the back border of the table cloth. Then, all too soon for me (when did I get this prone to tearing up?!) after the admonition about counting change, the other mom winks at me, the cue to slip away to let them run the show.

When I return an hour later, just the dregs of lemonade swill below the spigot, nearly impossible to drain into a cup, the folding chairs empty, sprigs of lavendar and purple daises flying, the boys wrestling on the corner lawn behind their stand. They spy me, straighten their shirts, caps, and race back to their chairs as my husband rides up on his bicycle from work just in time to buy the last cup and second-to-last cookie.

Other news, poetry news: I snuck away for a modest mini retreat with nine fabulous women last month, waking to group writing exercises, breakfast littered with conversations about words, stories, places to send work, drafts in progress, u-turns, left turns, and the profound swervings of writing together in the present moment. Which lead me away from blogging and back to writing poetry, salved by walks along the ocean, a bobcat the size of the heftiest of my former feral cats yawning on the front lawn, a buck with a full velvet rack. And the nightly walk between the three houses supernally black to the soft lull of one more conversation and a shared flashlight, the radiance of stars over us.

This net of like-minded women, their warmth, support and mirroring, prompted me also to send work out again, which means a haibun is forthcoming from Writers and Lovers Café (Fall 2013). The editor/poet/writer behind Writers and Lovers Café  is Tad Wojnicki (along with haiku poet Iyja J. Cabrera). Wojnicki also formerly ran Haiku Pix where I first came across his How to Ginko series of articles that contain beautiful illustrations and ideas for how to write haiku (check out the latest one, The Technique of the Opposites, and be sure to scroll down to also read The Zoom Lens Technique). 

And thanks is also due to Liz Brennan for introducing me, not only to Haiku Pix, etc., but to the haibun form in one of her online Nature Writing Classes.  She's currently teaching a poetry writing workshop titled Animals Make Us Human for Story Circle Network. Liz and I have also managed to stay busy collaborating at her ongoing prose poetry site, Perhaps, Maybe. Here are the links to the latest collaborations and their first lines (and remember to join her with a perhaps or a maybe of your own if you wish). To summer! And words, blessed words....

Your Child

Perhaps your child meant at first to come through my body...

Revision

Perhaps as a writer the desire to tell the truth haunts you, as it should, yet at the same time all past events over which you previously had no control are at last subject to your decisions, your revisions...

The Guest

Perhaps the body in sleep unburdens its flock of questions, like so many winged sirens, into the sky of dream...

Forever New

 Perhaps nothing is worth as much as what may replace it, when any given thing is only the first in a series of increasingly better things...

Photo credits:

Artwork on cover of my journal is by Paloma Estrada--I cut and paste her beautiful image of lanterns to my temporary notebook (from a brochure for the Coronado School of Arts) that I took to the Sea Ranch retreat where I fell in love not only with my retreat companions, but the sun, windchimes, cherries, hot tea, and birds nesting under the eaves.

 

Almost-Flowers, Celestial Aspirations and This Morning’s Descent into Poe: The Color of Lightning

The art that excites me the most has always had both a railing and wild river in it... Timothy Donnelly, March/April APR, 2012

Back in January when Elizabeth sent me her half of The Color of Lightning (see our latest recording here—the first we had to do remotely, not side by side in her yard or my woods) the prospector in her poem crying “Eureka,” inspired some general rummaging before I wrote my half. I discovered Asteroid 5621 (co-orbital with Mars) bears the name. And came across something of Edgar Allan Poe’s I’d never read titled, Eureka, A Prose Poem, which it turns out, is anything but a poem. But how clever of Poe to dodge scientific critique by calling his treatise on gravity a poem. I also like his dedication, which reads in part, “…to those who feel rather than to those who think -- to the dreamers and those who put faith in dreams as in the only realities…”

Out of the blue (without knowing I was writing about Poe), my brother visited several weeks later with a copy of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination under his arm, which he left as a gift for me. The illustrations are Harry Clarke’s (scroll down to the eleventh image here on 50 Watts to view the image I'll be discussing below; thanks to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings for the reference).

I love Clarke’s illustration for Descent into the Maelstrom which confronts us with a funnel of delicately layered Morse Code reminiscent lines mixed with repeating blurred comet tails and long dashes and dots of white in tightening rings. But even as the rings choke inward, the amount of black space the artist employs between rings grows. You immediately assign the location to the sea because of the vessel circling midway down the vortex, deck nearly parallel to the opposite side of the funnel. You (viewer) find no rim of sky; you are placed at the outer rings of the gyre looking at a slight angle down at the funnel whose tip you are not allowed to see (thus the secret fathoming of its genesis or end made worse, left to root in the imagination’s darker surmisings).

Once you stop thinking about that boat on its side spinning towards oblivion, you notice odd fragments of flotsam, wood, torn trees, or are they limbs of trees? Or worse? Then you realize one of those random bits forms a barrel, and to that barrel clings a survivor. Which ends up feeling more ominous than the image of the boat (though…check out the boat again…as you peer more closely it seems to house a human foot...and the back part of the deck appears fringed with human teeth, lower portion of a jaw, the boat the shape of a mouth opening in protest).

Flipping through the rest of the illustrations, I find the combination of ornate almost-flowers and detailed pattern that really otherwise should add up to ornament coupled with the sometimes gruesomely extending limbs and body proportions effectively betray the warp of psychological states Poe puts his readers through time after time. Clarke’s drawings match Poe’s methodical haunting, the way Poe rings you with words and portions of argument that should add up to reason but tilt towards madness.  The words chosen to describe Descent into the Maelstrom’s illustration reads: “The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic…upon the interior surface of a funnel…”

Initially the image felt familiar—I first identified as the boat trying to maintain position…boat of motherhood, boat of personhood, boat of poet trying to stay afloat. But once I saw the person clinging to the barrel, the lonely boat felt far less romantic in the light of this second image with its graver degree of depravity and desperation.

Weighing the emotion rings of each image (empty boat vs. barrel clinging survivor), I turned to a back issue of APR I found unpacking this weekend (in a stack of other reading material I was supposed to return to Elizabeth before we moved). In a conversation in APR’s March April 2012 Issue, Why Write If Not to Align Yourself with Time and Space with Mathew Zapruder, Ange Mlinko, Timothy Donnelly, Steve Almond, and Hannah Gamble, a couple of paragraphs by Timothy Donnelly moved me. In speaking of the sublime, the experience of it, how the relative safety of the observer (reader) figures, he left me with another useful visual:   “…The difference is that between terror and horror. It’s leaning over the railing at Niagara Falls versus actually falling in… The art that excites me the most has always had both a railing and wild river in it…” You need to read the whole conversation to appreciate all the nuances (I hope you will). Donnelly follows this by rooting for taking risks in writing, going the distance.

Been a long time since I felt that excited about writing poetry again, about reaching for the curve past the curve. I am thinking of the opposite vortex of terror Descent into the Maelstrom implies—is it possible for our generation of poets to write poems that spiral with equal height celestially, hope-driven, not sappy, not trite, not “angel-fied”, but where body meets potential of spirit.

Likely these poems already exist, so tell me your favorite. I’m feeling restless with my own tired orbit, spiraling on the updraft of others with brighter vision, thrilled for example with the birdsong and the rainbow hammock behind Elizabeth, the cheerful lilt of her voice in this week's recording. I’ll be recording my next half of poem outside near the birds of paradise, hoping too to catch the trills of the yellow warblers I hear right now and every morning when I wake.

End Notes:

Email Elizabeth if you want to join in her collaborative prose poetry blog, Perhaps, Maybe. You can send her a Perhaps or write a Maybe to one of her Perhaps stanzas. It will grow on you…I promise…

For images reminiscent of Clarke’s, but definitely aligned with a sweeter strain of music (enchanting, an antidote for me to the darker Clarke depictions) check out Kay Nielsen’s work. See Maria Popova’s Kay Nielsen’s Stunning 1914 Scandinavian Fairytale Illustrations.

 Photograph is cover of Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe with Illustrations by Harry Clarke; published by Calla Editions in 2008 (unabridged republication of an edition originally published by Tudor Publishing Co., New York, 1933). Twenty-nine tales, with illustrations (Eureka, A Prose Poem does not appear in the collection).

 

Crossing the Blue Bridge or Navigating by Mermaid

"Human soul, should it dream of me / Let my memory wakened be. / Moon, moon, oh do not wane…do not wane…” From Song of the Moon, excerpt from Dvorak’s opera Rusalka (notes by Martha Kate Lind)

I miss blogging here. Been meaning for weeks to write a transition post. But couldn’t, especially on the home site closest to my heart, during the deluge of physical and psychic details it took to uproot ourselves from our Sonoma County home. I managed a couple goodbye posts, one over at The Fertile Source, and again, another laced with what it meant to homeschool my daughter the last four months, over at Mother Writer Mentor.

New Year’s day we left the amber browns of our lime mottled redwood trunks and the perpetually damp earth beneath for the bright sand bordered rind of land housing Coronado. In the u haul, my husband, the boys and the Husky drove ahead of my daughter and I, our van overflowing with coolers, pillows, socks and a case of wet dog food to the dueling yowls of the two house cats overlaid by the calm and mystical voice of  poet / priest John O’Donahue on CD (Anam Cara, Wisdom from the Celtic World), parting gift of my writing collaborator Elizabeth.  

O’Donahue’s protracted r’s and the way he holds a syllable on the tongue mid-word takes the edge off leaving behind four feral cats renters have promised to feed, but when the sun sets, the tears come. My favorite of the cats, the older male with his gorgeous uneven throttle of a purr, is now likely rubbing his thick chin against the back door glass, one ear torn but intact, brown gold eyes scanning for us as he stands on his back legs and rests a paw on the second tier of door-panes.

My daughter notices I’m crying, so I admit it: I miss my ferals. Wish we could bring them. But it would be cruel. The woods are all they know. I’m trying to be bigger than that, reassure us both that though the woods are all we know, we’ll come to know the new city. Elizabeth, (play with her over at Perhaps Maybe—she’s still looking for prose poets) with her poet’s heart and acuity, reminded me before we left to take in the surroundings no matter what went down, notice the sun, sky, lay of the land.

Her advice comes in handy during our five long minutes of crisis the last leg of our adventure crossing the blue bridge into Coronado. Even as the u haul stalled and sputtered to a dead stop a mere 200 yards onto the bridge, I noticed less the panic and steady throng of cars streaming around us, more the red tip of sun plummeting past the Pt. Loma lighthouse. More the boats with their triangles of white sails, less the winking of the u haul’s hazard lights. Eventually the u haul started back up, we found our way to Orange Avenue, and the realtor kindly unlocked the door for us so we could sign our new lease and fumble our way through the maze of new rooms in the dark (without power).

If trees were king at the old home, water reigns queen here at this farthest tip of California. Since our new home won’t be ready for two weeks (we learn when we arrive—though we are happy to wait for new carpets and paint and tile), we take by day to the sea. I’m thinking of the round stained glass window that hung in our home in the trees featuring a mermaid whose hands cup the largest of a set of escaped bubbles of air--stand-in for her mirror.

Without a physical home and for the duration of this transition, I’m navigating by sign. Following on the heels of the image of the stained-glass mermaid, I find just outside the kitchen door garden of the new house a beautiful six inch metal mermaid, rusting a beautiful green bronze, left behind by the last tenant.

Here she floats in her own starfield, symbol of where air-line meets water-line. An entity that thrives in both domains. Symbol of decisions of maturity on the horizon. Threshold between girlhood and womanhood that we cross once ourselves and once again when our daughters cross it. Maybe once again when we lose our mothers; I don’t know. Tell me if you know.

I’ve often thought about the little mermaid (Hans Christian Anderson) and her infamous trade—the voice for legs, made a collage book once about it titled "Army of Lovers," wrote a bit about it in relation to raising a daughter earlier here and tangentiallly with regard to sirens in relation to marriage (Deciphering the Siren) here. This time I’m thinking about her infatuation with the prince, goaded by something I came across when scanning a summary of Ambiguities in HCA’s The Little Mermaid by Jacob Boggild and Pernille Heegaard (Andersen og Verden, Odense 1993). On their way to discussing the complexity of HCA's ending for the tale and wieghing the little mermaid's spiritual vs. sensual motivations, the authors remind us she falls in love with the prince because he reminds her of a statue she keeps in her garden.

soap by Cazgirl; see below for contact info

So I take up the thread: if she’s enamored with a statue, maybe she’s not really ready for the full blown flesh and blood human male, nor could he be ready for the girl with the sweetest voice (remember the mermaid hears the prince’s bride-to-be singing and it hurts her to know she could sing far more beautifully, if she hadn’t given up her voice). What would that relationship be like, say she kept her voice, and lured the prince with song.  Would he be able to see past her siren self, ever fathom her as a whole being?

Both prince and mermaid strike me as vulnerable. And The Little Mermaid wouldn’t be a fairytale without the sorrow of near-miss, the longing of separation, without which we’d miss the chance to fully contemplate the distance the pair would have to cross to coexist in mature relationship. And thus as readers we fall in love with yearning, its purity of impulse, unmarred by actuality of day to day relationship.

The new mermaid I found in the new house is not glass, but substantial, elemental (metal). Which brings O’Donahue to mind and his musings on the way our bodies are made of particles with memories of their own, earth memories from other times and peopled with other people from long ago so that sometimes we are swept with emotion the mind doesn’t understand.

Which also aptly describes my experience of listening to the San Fransicsco based vocal women’s ensemble Kitka. As we walked between our new home and the kids’ school along the waterway, bordered by ocean and harbor, I finally bought, downloaded, and listened to The Rusalka Cycle: Songs Between the Worlds, drawn to the image on the album’s cover of a woman cloaked in blue, rising towards the faint reflection of her face marking the water’s lid.  

Notes for the album read: “In Slavic folklore, Rusalki are the restless spirits of women who have died unjust or untimely or unnatural deaths. They inhabit the waters, forests, and fields, luring people to them with their mesmerizing songs and wild laughter.”  Titles from To the Lake to Awakening to River Rose to Sirens forewarn of the supernally gorgeous field of lament one is about to enter.

Here far voices, jubilantly macabre, swirl as if from down a long silver hall with unparalleled simplicity to the lilts of cello. Phantom criers rise and fall in the background, garlanded by the voices of sisters. In the sweet high notes and later powerful guttural chants, one senses reproach beyond confrontation: a complete mirror and witnessing to the suffering of not only the Rusalka but those left behind and those later ensnared by her state.

Songs like Siren or Wave might frighten a male audience (and some female), but a preverbal part of me felt soothed by the force of group lament. You get the feeling that when something is known it is known forever, fathomed in the survivors’ eyes. Debts remain to the living and the departed. I read that a Rusalka’s state can be transformed if her death is avenged; Kitka, with sound, has so delineated the sorrow of untimely death that it it feels an avenging, via song. 

When I asked permission to run the album cover, longtime Kitka singer Shira Cion directed me to a beautiful background article about the process of making the album, "Singing Shapeshifters in the Shadow of Chernobyl: Kitka Ignites the Embers of a Disappearing Song Ritual" which details the journey the group took to the Ukraine (where rusalki rituals are still practiced) with singer Mariana Sadovska as their guide.



Kitka

Reading about an early morning experience the group had in a village near the Belarusian border, I felt humbled once again by synchronicity. Though I have never traveled to the Ukraine, my ancestors hail precisely from that region. My father (who introduced me to Kitka when I was in my early 20s) taught me that our name loosely translates to "one who is of the marshes"). No wonder I wrote for pages in my journal while listening to The Rusalka Cycle, at the mercy of a cellular recognition beyond my control or immediate ken.

Those pages of raw writing ended on the asssertion, "you can't take the girl out of the girl" and the question, "how can such joy coexist with such sorrow?" I only know Kitka pulls it off, presenting the emotions as two halves of one sphere.  Just as promised by Shira in the article: “We hope that the songs invite the reckless spirits of the Rusalki into the imagination of each listener, opening portals into haunting and beautiful realms between the worlds.”



Sculpture by Ananda Beattie

To balance out the foray to such harrowing depth, I return to the lighter and equally necessary wisdom of John O’Donahue’s words. In the chapter, Your Solitude is Luminous, O’Donahue implies if we can stop thinking long enough to feel, the opportunity beckons to cross over to rapture, inhabiting the moment with multiple layers of the little self we know so intimately and the big self we aspire to encompass comprised of earth, sky, water, and the scale of human experience across time.

In June of 2010 when we were first contemplating moving, I found solace as well in the words of poet Robert Haas. Prior to reading from his Whitman series (Song of Myself and Other Poems by Walt Whitman, edited and annotated by Haas and Paul Ebenkamp), Haas spoke of the fertility of border zones, how deer like to graze at the edge of the forest where they can see the meadow and the stream; fish, in similar fashion, are drawn to water transition zones, finding at such merging locales rare and rich nutrient exchange. I’m trying my best to occupy the internal zone with grace--picturing wingbuds between the shoulder blades, thinking of butterflies and mermaids with wings.

 Related Mermaid musings:
 

Ananda’s line: Ananda Beattie's mermaid sculpture; poetry set to the photograhs of Robyn Beattie, including the one above Robyn took of Ananda's sculpture.

 Mermaid soap (see middle photo in this post): a xmas gift this year from my mother-in-law, of sandalwood, I found her on top of one of our packed boxes when looking for two CD rental movies we accidentally packed and brought with us. Heavenly scent of sandalwood, the label reads: cazgal [at] comcast [dot] net, out of Cazadero California, the sweetest smelling bar of soap I’ve ever had, with a stunning mermaid sculpture on top. I can't imagine ever using it.

Dvorak solo, Rusalka: (Anna Netrebko 2007): a beautiful performance, Netrebko, in shimmering gold, channels pure Rusalka.

See also fantasy writer / blogger T.F. Walsh's rich list of the appearance of the Rusalka across mediums; I learned about Dvorak's work here; hope you'll also check out her mythology manual.

Related fairy tail musings (The King and The Corpse) and first crossing of the blue bridge into Coronado: A Summer Solstice Promise.

 

Cazadero on Dwellable

Fall Classes, Fall Poem: Transmigration

Can I just confess, here it is fall, and I'm falling...falling behind on some goals, making progress on others. I'm still gearing up to work live with my Transformative Blogging book, sharing as I go over at my new website. I still plan to shortly have my first post up there, it is just that...I'm so comfortable blogging here at Feral Mom, Feral Writer...I'll just have to stretch to grow into my new site.

 
In the meantime, the prose poetry collaborations continue at Perhaps, Maybe, though the teaching year has kicked in for both Liz and I. Here's our final summer offering, and here's Liz preparing the deck chairs for the "filming" of our micro-reading of Transmigration.

 
If you are foot loose and fancy free this fall, or at least somewhat on the loose and hungry for poetry, I invite you to join me for one of my upcoming classes. Here are the latest:

 

Reading and Writing the International Poetry of Motherhood and Fatherhood

(begins September 10, 2012).

Join this writing group to mine the globe, reading and writing poems, journal entries, or prose based on the universal experience of birth, labor, fertility, adoption, or parenthood (or the experience of having parents). We will read poems and selections of prose from a number of different countries each week, and in response, we will write poetry or prose reflecting our experience of birth, labor, fertility, or the gifts and challenges of parenting. We will start with Finland, in honor of A Finnish Mother Writer in our family. For full description or to sign up, visit Mother Writer Mentor's Poetry Workshops.

Transformative Blogging for Women

(begins October 8th, 2012)

This course offers beginning bloggers the chance to launch a blog and get feedback, and for more experienced bloggers, this course offers the chance to take stock of one’s blogging mask, reach, and other goals and provides a path to recalibration. As is the case with good writing of any kind, the details you choose to present as a blogger make all the difference. You’ll need to make decisions about which parts of yourself or your topic you’ll reveal or explore and who you are striving to become through the process of committing to blogging (since the consistent practice of writing around a focused topic leads inevitably to transformation of various kinds). For full course description or to sign up, visit Story Circle Network.

Blogging for Writing Mothers

(begins November 5, 2012)

In the wake of motherhood’s potentially all-encompassing submersion, blogging offers a unique way to stay connected during the natural, necessary isolation that can occur when one steps out of former orbits of relation and habit to raise children and lay down new routines (or the sudden quiet arriving when children leave the nest). How do you stay connected to your writing self? This gentle blogging workshop offers a chance to create material towards a future blog or support you as you blog and raise children or redefine your relationship to self and children. For full course description or to sign up, visit Mother Writer Mentor's Poetry Workshops.

 

 

Three Stars and Atlantis: Micro Readings with Liz Brennan

Summer time: time enough to fold cup after cup of blackberries into muffin dough, pancake batter, home made pie shells.

Time enough, once the rest of the household snores, for a mother with insomnia to grab and eat raw by the chilled handful the remainder of the crop…

And time enough, mercifully, to slip into Perhaps, Maybe, play with Liz Brennan.  

Three stars (on longing and flowering plums):

Micro Reading and Text of Poem: Maybe, when peering into the depths of my own shadow, every beginning...

Atlantis (on fathers and daughters):

Micro-reading

Text of Poem: Perhaps the female body, at point of conception...


Liz is currently looking for others to collaborate with her... Perhaps once you start, maybe you'll find it hard to stop...

Beautiful Unity and A Fine Disinterest: Micro Readings with Liz Brennan

Here are the latest two collaborations posted on Perhaps, Maybe, composed with Liz Brennan (one on roses and motherhood, and one on the reverse kaleidoscope of aging--the spiral back to birth). We meet, we drink tea, we step out on the back deck in the perfect light of late summer dusk and record. The challenge: to get through both verses before the roar of random motorcycle or pickup truck surging up the hill.

1) Beautiful Unity: Perhaps just after the rose is cut and set into a crystal vase it brings summer into any room… Text of Poem and Micro Reading

2) A Fine Disinterest: Perhaps as we age, we cultivate a fine disinterest in the attraction of objects until they no longer catch at us like brambles… Text of poem ,
Micro-Reading

Thank you Liz for the invitation to play.

Perhaps, Maybe: The End and The Search with Liz Brennan

Our latest collaboration, The End, appears on Elizabeth's Perhaps, Maybe blog. I hope you'll enjoy it, the text version, and that you'll enjoy it again as the three-d version, here, as a live micro-reading (recorded still very much under siege of mosquitoes, and beneath the canopy of the family redwoods, on my back deck). 

Since we are both poets, of course, the end doubles as a beginning (for nothing incites, invigorates, or inspires a poet more than a shut door).

Earlier this month, I failed to post a link to The Search, another one of our collaborations. Are you in search of  ideas? Love? Both? ...Neither? Let me know...

Photo by Robyn Beattie.