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| Sands of Time photo Robyn Beattie |
Oh the sands of
time!
Just when I feel
squeezed of breath and hours, here comes an external image to capture how I’m
feeling internally… this week Urgent Care for a child pulling a muscle using
resistance bands during his early morning workout. The resultant right-side
excruciating 24-hour pain mimicked appendicitis…so off we went to sit behind
our thin blue shroud pulled shut on its curved ceiling track where the predicaments
of the more seriously injured float through to us even as we cringe and try not
to hear.
While we wait
for his chest x-ray, my son takes selfies in his Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum
hospital smock. And there go the hours slated for writing and teaching. What
can we do, my son and I—he, but to make art of his “self” and me to peruse
email, finding inspiration in the images my poetry movie collaborator Robyn continually
sends to my inbox, reminder of the precious and timeless field of collaborative
delight we share.
I have a backlog
of images from Robyn for our latest movie for The Three Oranges (from the poem
in November Butterfly). All the
images have been plunked along a timeline to music and voice recordings; I just
have to figure out how to get each image to stop zooming in and zooming out in
the new software I’m learning how to use. I’ll post a link when the movie goes
live.
Poetry Tour of the Forms
Here’s a Haiku
Mobile I made last Father’s Day (for my father). I think of it as a physical
premonition to the beautiful Feral Haiku Chandelier we assembled at Ghost Ranch
on retreat at A Room of Her Own Foundation. Come out and write your own Haiku
with me this month at San Diego Writers, Ink! Pass it on to all of your San
Diego friends with day hours to spare!
Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms, In
Person at San Diego Writers, Ink
Four-hour
workshop: a poetry fest!
10 a.m. - 2 p.m.
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.
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| Photo by Robyn Beattie |
Motherhood and Art: Uneasy Bedfellows: A
Guest Post by Tina Pocha
Also up this
month at Mother Writer Mentor, a beautiful post by Tina Pocha (I met her at
Ghost Ranch this summer) about the and/or dilemmas of motherhood when
mothers are also artists and/or writers. Can we do both? All three? How? Pocha muses:
I had hit the limits of my imagination,
the boundaries of my fear. I didn’t know how to raise children and still grow
me. I didn’t know how to serve their needs and mine. I didn’t know how to be
everything I wanted to be.
As part of
considering her dilemma, Pocha introduces us to an Italian poet/sculptor Mirella
Bentivoglio. In an interview at Literary Mama Pocha selected for us to reference, I
see mirrored back a part of my own journey as co-founding blogger at Mother
Writer Mentor. Interviewer Toti O'Brien writes, “Since she [Bentivoglio] continually promoted
other artists, mainly women, she didn’t feel confined in a lonely, private
struggle.” That sums up how it feels to be part of Mother Writer Mentor. I love
engaging and learning from the mothers writing and sharing there. Thank you Tina! Read the rest of Pocha's post here: Motherhood and Art: Uneasy Bedfellows
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| Photo by Robyn Beattie |
My Geppetto: Fairytale Review Finalist
One of this
year’s new poems, “My Gepetto” was a finalist for the Fairytale Review’s 2015 Awards in Poetry and Prose; I’m honored, and motivated by the gesture--I’ll be writing
a new crop of poems, and of course, submitting again. I hope you’ll send The
Fairytale Review your best fairytale work next year as well. Good luck!
The Permission Slip Movie: Curator’s
Choice Finalist at Doublebunny Press
Last
spring I took part in supplying footage for a movie one of my favorite artist/writer mother colleagues,
Suzi Banks Baum (of Laundry Line Divine), put together with Lynette Lucy Najimy
about what it takes for mothers to get to their creative work. When asking us
to take part in this project, Baum wrote:
I hear from so many women that they feel
“their feet are nailed to the floor.” They cannot picture what it would look
like for them to step away from the dishes, the television, and the two and a
half jobs and find fifteen minutes behind a closed door to write or think or
sit in the dark, alone.
Out of hours
of footage, Baum and Najimy created this six-minute video you may enjoy if you
too are a feral mom trying to get her to work as I have been for years. Baum
prefaces the video on Vimeo with these questions:
Do you find yourself composing poetry
while folding laundry? Have you been putting off writing until your kids are
off to college?Out of the Mouths of Babes is a circle of creative women who
express from inside motherhood. This small movie may be the permission slip
that gets you started.
Here’s a link
to the video, which was a Curator’s Choice Finalist at the Rabbit Heart Poetry
Film Festival hosted by Doublebunny Press, on Vimeo: The Permission Slip
Screening of November Butterfly Poetry
Movies
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 14. Robyn will read the poems,
show the movies, and discuss her images.
List of Movies:
She Dressed in a Hurry, Lady Di
Amelia
Mordred’s Dream
Thumbeline
The Corridor, Guinevere to her Mother
And, in case you
teach poetry or write, here are links to poetry prompts I wrote based on the
poems and the movie imagery:
