Writers and Lovers Cafe and a December Book Giveaway Offer

Writers and Lovers Café arrived in my mailbox all the way from Taiwan, full of haiku, haiga, senryu, haibun, tanka, and tanka classics (edited by Tad Wojnicki--I wrote about his work earlier in Lemonade Stands and Writers and Lovers Café). In this slim and lovely debut volume you’ll find the usual favorite haiku suspects (moons and roses) but you will also find a wilder array of volunteers in the book’s word cloud from Ferraris to fruit, AA to sirloin, Auschwitz to flea markets, garlic to spiders, and castles to children’s handprints.

And it features a haibun by yours truly, Reunion, which attempts to capture the emotional fray of trying to right the disparate needs of a family of five reconciling after three years of weekend marriage. No slender lover pining under cherry blossoms—think peevish wife and preteen daughter on shore, and loose in the sea: the surfing husband and sons. An entirely different kind of pining. Or pinning. Some kind of defeat and attempted triumph. I have now written a description longer than the haibun, so I'll stop here.

Except to say my husband is singing in the shower..Yes, honey, I wrote this one about you. As I've mentioned on this blog before, whenever I get a poem rejection, he's famous for admonishing, "Was it a poem about me?!....No?...So write one about me and I promise it'll get taken..." There you go, I concede, more poems in his future. About him.

Here’s the back cover of this edition of Lovers and Writers Cafe listing an upcoming call for submissions just in case you have taken up a haiku challenge--for instance there’s a wildish group of AROHO women committing to writing a haiku a day starting in January; if you join me in that challenge,  by Tad’s haiku deadline here of March 1, 2014, you should have at last 60 new haiku. And what better thing to do with a series of haiku than to submit them to someone who will actually read and cherish them?

Additional Notes:

This edition runs $6 a copy plus $4 for international shipping; here’s the link should you wish to give Writers and Lovers Café to the haiku fanatic in your life. There you'll also find submission guidelines in a larger font.

Another amazing site celebrating these forms and more with beautiful galleries and video collage, with thanks to Liz Brennan for pointing me to their site:

Haiga Online; up this October, “Same Moon"


Book Giveaway:

I am teaching Poetry of Motherhood online starting January 6-January 31, cost is $125; in an attempt to entice you to register, I promise to send a copy of the anthology, Labor Pains and Birth Stories (Catalyst Book Press, 2009, ed. Jessica Powers) to the first two students who enroll (an $18 value). The anthology features an Introduction by Tina Cassidy, Afterword by Jessica Powers, essays by Ariel Gore, Amy Parker, Ann Angel, Ashini J. Desai, yours truly, and 24 more writing mothers.

The cover art features a block-print I drew, carved, and rolled out three weeks before my first child was born...you'll notice the ecstatic depiction of the mother despite crowning child...a giveaway of another nature that I had no reference yet for the serious work of labor. On the other hand, it rightly intuits the absolute joy of holding one's infant for the first time.

I hope to have the chance to work with you in January. Writers of all genres welcome as we use Fertile Source poems for inspiration but the form our writing takes varies by writer.

Marriage’s Lineage of Imagery and The Poetry of Motherhood

I wrote this post last year, but due to the surreal anguish and ongoing questions (would we be ok? would we be reunited?) I waited. In synchronous harmony, I am preparing to teach Poetry of Motherhood again, but this time, selecting poems from the sun-filled home I inhabit with my husband.

When my husband-to-be flew out to Iowa City to woo me thirteen years ago with all the muscled vigor of a grown man—certainly no longer looking anything like the freckled kid I remembered from sixth grade—and asked me to marry him, his eye was caught by an image on my shelf of Guinevere knighting Lancelot (artwork by Edmund Blair Leighton). That, he proclaimed, should be our theme. 

So we hired a dress-maker; she skillfully replicated the long draping sleeves of Guinevere’s gown, sketched out and sewed to red pigskin the black griffin-like bird of Lancelot’s heraldry to my husband’s tunic. I remember sort of glossing over the metaphor of the entangled love triangle between Guinevere and Lancelot and Arthur, choosing to focus on the parallel spiritual solace Guin and Lance may have found in the later years of their acquaintance.

Our wedding guests arrived adorned in period costume. We hired a harpist who by chance could also fulfill my husband’s request for closing processional by bagpipe; under the canopy of redwoods, we married in a stone amphitheater to the low sweet trill of a hermit thrush. We filled our years with children and jobs and the stresses of our economic times, which lead to my husband taking a second job in a city a flight’s distance from us.

 After two years of the inevitable strain our situation placed on our marriage we found ourselves facing a crisis of trust. I feared irreparable damage. Wriggling under the clarifying purification pain provides, I farmed out my three children and stayed with my aunt in an attempt to gain perspective. Simultaneously, I happened to be on the hunt for poems to use in my Poetry of Motherhood class, grateful for the distraction work lent from the psychic sorting obsessing both heart and head. Tea in hand, from across the room, I spotted the pale green spine of a book titled, “Ireland in Poetry.”

When I slid the book free, I found two familiar figures gracing the cover. In slightly different costume (her dress, blue--not white, his head, covered in chain mail--not bared), but so close to the image we’d used on our wedding invitation, I felt as if the figures were speaking directly to me: All is not lost. But you are, for now, turned away from one another. What relief—I could acceptance our distance. And take comfort in the image of gripped dress sleeve linking the forlorn lovers. Later that night, a poet friend of mine said: Why don’t you advise your husband to forgive himself, and you, do the same: forgive yourself. She was hinting at two equally important halves of forgiveness: forgiving the other person matters little if self-blame runs riot in the background of one's inner monologue.

While my husband and I still had hours of emotional thicket to clear, both the image and the suggestions from my friend (which I voiced to my husband) seemed solid reminders of possible redemption. Another friend chimed in with: The only way through perceived betrayal is through…through the physical grip on the body, through the triggered childhood griefs that attach likes boxcars to the engine of one’s particular train. At least the caboose, vibrant red, has room for two to stand viewing side by side the ground crossed to get here, retreating, retreating.

Notes and further reading:

Book cover: Ireland in Poetry, Edited by Charles Sullivan. Cover image, "The Meeting on the Turret Stairs," by Sir Frederick Burton, 1864. Watercolor on paper. The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.

A beautiful collection of poems; for Poetry of Motherhood, I chose for my students, the poem Cliona, by Catherine Twomey, a mother daughter poem graced by the opening lines , "You are letting her go / from you slowly / so gently she hardly / knows."

A plea for compassion for new fathers: Notecard to a Nursing Mother: Let The Husband Be Where He Is (a follow-up to Postcard to a Nursing Mother: Be Where You Are) at Mother Writer Mentor, where I'll be teaching Poetry of Motherhood.

Hope you'll join me for Poetry of Motherhood (April 22). Check out this video I made last year with my daughter's help out on our back deck in the redwoods, "Introduction to Poetry of Motherhood" for a better idea of our class. Also know we aren't strictly in the business of writing poetry. We write to prompts and while poetry is welcome, it isn't required. We had a great time last year.

For a look at the quandaries and intricacies of blogging about the personal and traversing the public/private line, see an interview Edith O'Nuallain (yes, of Ireland) conducted with me earlier this month (posted in two installments): On the Art and Craft of Transformative Blogging and Part 2.


 

Last Week to Sign Up for Poetry of Motherhood

by Peter Pryputniewicz

2013 Update: I'm adding my updated link to the January 2014 Poetry of Motherhood online workshop; please join us!

I’m very excited to be teaching an on-line poetry class: we will write poems as well as read poems by various mother writers (including poems published at The Fertile Source).

Help me spread the word…I still have spots available for this class, slated to start Monday, February 27 (and offered at an introductory rate of $100 for a month-long workshop on-line.

To the Cradle and Beyond: Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood

“My upstairs neighbor, mother of three, lives in a chronic extremity of demand that I witness from below as a kind of human storm. I do not think she would want to read poems that posit the singular solitary investigations of the privileged 'I' of lyric poetry."--Ann Lauterbach, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience

What kind of poems would that mother of three living “in a chronic extremity of demand” write? Wether you identify as the solitary mother writer (children fledged) listening from below, or the mother at the heart of the maelstrom of childrearing, join this on-line poetry circle for a chance to mine poetry of the past as well as contemporary poems (including those we’ve published at The Fertile Source) for structural and thematic inspiration for writing our own poems reflecting our experiences of motherhood. The confessional poets along with the honeycomb of the internet position us uniquely not only to communicate globally, but to write fearlessly about the realities of the complexities of the journey to, through, and beyond motherhood. Join us in this excavation and celebration of the layers we occupy simultaneously as mother writers.

This on-line course is open to all mother writers and all levels of writing experience. Weekly reading of poems paired with assignments for generating new poetry. Participant driven topics for poem generation encouraged; specific exercises offered for those who wish to use them. Guidelines for creating a safe and respectful comment community will be provided on enrollment.

“If, through caring for my children, I lost writing time, I gained by the expansion of vision and insight and compassion my experiences with them gave me…The writing I was able to do in those years is suffused with the energy my children radiated.” Pattiann Rogers, "Degree and Circumstance" (which appeared in Where We Stand: Women Poets on Literary Tradition, Edited by Sharon Bryan)

“The subject [of motherhood] has been hijacked, candy-coated and polluted by such powerhouses as Victorian culture and the post-war Fifties in America. Luckily, artists and feminists set out to rescue us from the sickly-sweet ideal that had shrink-wrapped the experience and denied the complexity of the role.” Nancy White, Bringing to Birth: Poetry of Motherhood, Fall 2009 Sow’s Ear (read full review here).


Related post: So You Say You’re a Poetry Editor (on connecting with mothers and the poetry of motherhood)

On my She Writes blog, 2013:
Marketing and The Poetry of Motherhood: Sustaining Your Joy Factor

Announcing Mother Writer Mentor: Practical Tips for Writing Moms

I’m very excited to announce a sister site to the literary e-zine The Fertile Source called Mother, Writer, Mentor: Practical tips for Writing Moms.

This project has long personal roots reaching back to the year my second son was born. Fridays, thanks to the support of my father and his wife, were the day I got to sneak away and maintain my secret life as a writer over at Coffee Catz in Sebastopol. Owner Debbie, while sweeping the crumbs out from under my feet, would stop and ask how the babies were, smile, and listen to my dreams of pursing my writing.

Those Fridays (writing--when I wasn’t catching up with Debbie) along with my subscription to Poets and Writers kept me sane; I’d scope out the very back section where P&W lists specific calls for entries using the deadlines to create new work. Fresh from a disorienting experience with a midwife-attended-birth, I came across an ad for birth story essays. I wrote an essay and fired it off into the void.

The editor took it; some time elapsed between then and the actual publication of the book. I got cold feet; the feminist in me wondered how I could publish an essay that not only touched on date rape, but shed midwifery in a negative light. I retracted the essay. But the editor called me one afternoon. What could I stand to edit out so I could live with it in print? she asked. And we spent the better portion of an hour salvaging the essay.

I remember getting off the phone and thinking how unusual, and lovely, it was to have an extra set of compassionate eyes right where I was blind and that planted the seed for me to imagine a writing life in which I worked with other like minded individuals or co-collaborators to realize my professional writing goals.

Several years later, after helping promote the birth anthology (Labor Pains and Birth Stories), working side by side with that editor (maybe you’ve guessed by now, I’m speaking here of Jessica Powers, founder of Catalyst Book Press), it was easy for me to say yes when Jess asked if I’d like to come on board as poetry editor at The Fertile Source.

Since then, we’ve had number of ideas up our sleeves about how the world could stand to be a friendlier place for writing moms. Mostly questions. Like why isn’t there childcare offered at most writing conferences? Or scholarships that cover childcare? Or writing retreats for families? We also liked the idea of fledged mentors (children no longer in diapers, though maybe still underfoot, or in college or beyond) offering their support to new mothers.

These were some of the conversations behind the desire to create Mother, Writer, Mentor. While we develop the resource portion of the site, and in keeping with a vision of the kind of teaching lives we’d like to have (working with writing moms) we’ll each be offering a course this spring (from yours truly: To the Cradle and Beyond: Excavating and Writing the Poetry of Motherhood and from Jess: Sexy Mommy Stories: Writing Romance Back into Motherhood).

I would love it if you’d consider guest posting for us down the road or sharing your ideas about how we can offer a resource or two for the writing mothers in your life. Jess wrote last week about the changes to writing life since the birth of her son; I took over this week to look at writing while traveling with kids, dog in tow.

I Write, I Mother

I’ve posted at Feral Mom, Feral Writer for five years now, blogging a random act of desperation I took so I’d have a writing deadline when I was nursing my third child and wondering if I’d ever get back the brain-cells that seemed to be siphoned out with the breast milk. But I’m seriously considering a dog blog: Thorn In My Side: Not Your Usual Dog Lover’s Blog. Because I both love and can’t stand the fact that having launched all three children (the youngest started kindergarten this fall), I suddenly have a fourth. She’s the runt of the litter, a beautiful, troublesome Siberian Husky my husband brought home to protect our family for the times he has to work away from us.

I’m walking the black borealis of the glittering diamonds of sand, signature of last night’s rhythmic retreat of the tide, wishing mother earth were not mere metaphor but an actual entity with the power to keep my three children alive for the duration of this week’s vacation in San Diego. My husband works til five, so solo I’m tracking three bobbing black dots, the chinned hoods of our children, one child boardless, drifting further out, a little in trouble I realize as I walk towards the surf zone dragging the reluctant Husky, the lifeguard pulling up behind me, megaphone chirping as he orders my flailing eight year old to stay where he can stand because of the rip tide.

Read more here.