November Butterfly: Cover Equivocations and Peer Counselors

I am ecstatic to unveil the cover for “November Butterfly,” my first collection of poems (on schedule for November 2014 release from Saddle Road Press). Cover photo courtesy of my long-time collaborator Robyn Beattie; cover magic and design thanks to Don Mitchell (“A Red Woman was Crying”) of SRP.

Much deliberation went on behind the scenes as we attempted to hone in on selections from a generous image garden. For several months, place-holding the cover, we featured work by Sandy Frank from our ongoing poetry/sculpture collaboration drawing on poems in “November Butterfly.”

Sandy's sculpture we considered choosing for the cover hosts gold monarchs across her chest; across her back, beautiful black birds and the poem “Someone.” At some point, Sandy and I will put together a show of the sculpture poems (when we land a venue and have rounded out the collection, and if they don’t all sell before then; "The Painter’s Wife" sold last month). And even as I agonized over the decision, my loving editor Ruth Thompson (“Woman with Crows”) reminded me there will be other books and other opportunities to play.

I celebrated “final cover unveiling” with my sister in BeHe (Between the Heights) Twiggs Bakery and Coffee House; we opted for a couple cups of the Mad Russian blend (what else?!) and a couple excellent MJ’s Vegan Gourmet Excelsior Bars and nestled in an armchair. Here I am pictured on location with a tall volume of poems by Sophie Robinson we found tucked on the bookshelf right under the Blue Buddha. This was my first exposure to Sophie's work.

Other news for poems forthcoming in “November Butterfly”: Peer Counselor is live today online at Chaparral. This zine for Southern California writers is edited by Kimberly Young (“Night Radio”). Peer Counselor celebrates the unsung heroes we have in counselors. Who came up with the concept of peer counselors? Brilliant.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

Also in this Summer 2014 Issue of Chaparral: An Interview with Douglas Kearney:

When I’m editing a poem, one of the things I’m always thinking of is: if I change this word what happens to the music of the stanza? Do I get new music? Do I lose all the music? Do I only get ‘sense’ or do I also get ‘sound’? So I’m always listening for this equilibrium between sound and sense…

And I couldn’t resist making a word cloud, taking a couple words here and there from each poem in the zine:

Egypt, Musak, red arrows, astronomer, communist, Mallomars, Jamaica, skulls, monkey, geode, vodka, condoms, Apollo, void, DNA, arsonist, Los Angeles, orphan, lollipop, priests, cat, ghosts, Apache, desert, rain, coins, linens, cane, urn, peaches, mirror.

Enjoy!

Sculpture by Sandy Frank

Notes:

Review of Kim Young’s "Night Radio" at Pebble Lake Review by Melanie Jordan

A Conversation with Kim Young at Coachella Review with Kari Hawkey

Mark Salzer, PhD, Temple University, is part of the team articulating the usefulness of peer counseling methods.

Thumbelina: Innocence Found

Still from Thumbelina, photo by Robyn Beattie

“...all the while she was really the loveliest creature that one could imagine”
--Thumbelina

Thumbelina the poem is live in Issue #1 of the NonBinary Review—available to download as a Zoetic Press app through iTunes (for viewing on iPad 2 with ios 7 minimum). Or if you want to hear the poem poured over images, cue up the photo poem montage of  Thumbelina Robyn and I put together, accessible on YouTube, featuring Stephen Pryputniewicz (my father) on keyboard with his spare and lovely adaptation of Mort Garson’s Taurus, The Voluptuary from the album “Cosmic Sounds: celestial counterpoint with words and music” (originally released in 1967).

Thumbelina, the sprite, remains for me a tiny harbinger of the time before—as the saying goes—“innocence was lost”…I must have been about eleven years old, coloring in the outlines of Thumbelina in my upstairs bedroom in the sleepy town of Villa Grande on the Russian River. Surrounded by cutouts of the mustached black and white Purina Cat Chow cats I’d taped to the walls with their silky angelfish whiskers peering over my shoulder, I lay across a pink bedspread on a white and gold canopy bed I’d inherited from an older girl, my new best friend, up the street. On her way to high school she’d leave me handwritten notes on my gatepost….before “it” happened and I had something to hide forever.

Such simple joy—coloring in the flower on which stood the bare-legged Thumbelina, each petal a different color like Joseph’s coat of many colors. I was not a mother then. Unaware that the story of the mother would matter someday. Her loneliness at the end having to let Thumbelina go. More the idea of daughter than the real time daughter.

Photo by Robyn Beattie

I’m surprised to find, in writing the poem, that girl, mother, and flower coexist in the imagination alongside an innocence I thought lost, beside a self I thought irreparably fractured.  I'm also surprised to discover it takes years to undo certain misassumptions.  Several years ago, I approached a community service agency about applying for a grant to fund a project focused on using writing to help rape survivors. One of the staff members casually said something like:

“You know, families come to us absolutely devastated, thinking they’ll never get over it (sexual trauma to a child or teen). But of course everyone can, and does, they just need to hear someone say it with conviction. Of course both the child and the family can heal.”

I nodded as if I knew, “Sure, of course.” But internally, I was elated. No, I didn’t know. For years I assumed one had to go on, irreversibly damaged. And that the only option was to cloak and hide carefully enough so others would not divine the broken core "you."

We didn’t get the grant, but I made out like a bandit with the gold at the end of the conversation’s rainbow with that one insight. Fast forward a couple of years, at which point I met Saddle Road Press sister Michelle Wing (author of Body on the Wall). In her I found a kindred spirit, already doing beautiful work with a program she started called Changing Hurt to Hope (which she describes in this interview conducted by Erica Rothberg at The California Journal of Women Writers).

Healing happens with naming, just as pain softens when witnessed or shrouded. Like the pale white cloth in the still Robyn and I chose for our movie to accompany Thumbelina’s admonition to her mother, “It still ended with you, childless again at the window…” I love the image, a veil over the shared fragility and strength of the mother/daughter bond. Artist Victoria Ayres (creator of the artwork in that frame) writes in her statement:

In my current work using silk/cotton thread panels and stressed tissue paper, which overlay the figure and elicit a sense of masking or covering over, the viewer sees only parts of the image. This work speaks to the layers of experiences, both painful and affirming, that mold who we are and who we become over time…

My gratitude, then, for the gift of writing, for the chance to try on viewpoints and imagined incarnations like robes in a closet. And then to shed them.

I suppose Thumbelina reminds us (fairytale mothers and earth mothers alike) that our daughters are neither ours to keep nor give away. And that we arrive of our own accord, to find our way along a trail littered with joys and devastations in uneven measure that magic will, god-willing, offset, and on good days, trump.

Notes:

NonBinary Review’s layout for Issue #1: A Grimm Collection of Modern Fairy Tales gives you the option to read the Grimm’s version as well as contributor versions of Snow White, Little Red Cap, Cinderella, and the Pied Piper, to name a few. Through July, they are taking submissions based on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the issue after, L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz. Submission guidelines here.

Saddle Road Press sisters Michelle Wing (author of the poetry collection, "Body on the Wall") and Ruth Thompson (author of the poetry collection, "Woman with Crows") and I will be reading at Moe's Bookstore in Berkeley on Thursday, June 19 at 7:30 p.m. at the invitation of Poetry Flash. Thompson's "Woman With Crows" was reviewed earlier this week at The California Journal of Women Writers.

Up at Mother Writer Mentor this week, Lifting the Domestic: A Conversation with Jayne Benjulian in which Benjulian deepens a conversation started at TCJWW about Barbara Rockman's poetry collection, "Sting and Nest." Benjulian remarks, "To lift the domestic into the poetic is quietly radical..."


Photos of the bird in this post are by Robyn Beattie, as is the author photo and book cover for November Butterfly on this poster; book cover design by Don Mitchell.

My Bicycle, My Chariot and The Angel Tree: Writing Despite Chaos

Amos Robinson, My Bike, Tidelands Collection
www.portofsandiego.org

Oh my bicycle—

Forgotten Chariot, spin

Me across Earth’s loom…

I got back on my bicycle this month thanks to the misadventures of April. Though I’m blessed to only be bound by one appointment a week (teaching a night blogging class), I’ve been at the mercy of new variations on the chaos the kids typically reserve for outwitting homework and undermining chore schedules. And it has me second guessing pursuing my writing life outside the house.

When the kids were little I could pretty much perfect a day’s trajectory and control outcomes. Strollers give you walking restraining systems. Cars, car-seats. You see, hear, and smell your little people twenty-four-seven, for better or for worse. You just don’t go anywhere without a sticky chubby hand or three holding yours.



Silver Strand Nature Discovery Trail, words by Edith Purer

But now I have a very new teen, a tween, and the youngest long since out of diapers. My teen was set to fly alone on a teaching day when the spiral started with a last minute flight delay, husband working a night shift. I had just enough time to walk my kiddo to the gate and trust her to board within the hour. I popped in to a coffee-shop, scanning the kid-list in my mind for reassurance: one son at soccer practice with instructions to bike to the neighbor after, the other with a friend, and the teen happily Instagramming Selfies and eating Starburst at the airport gate.

As I stirred brown sugar into my coffee, I relaxed into the music coming out over the speakers: gentle guitar, a woman’s voice I couldn’t place, and the refrain, “Don’t pick a fight with a poet”(a song by Madeleine Peyroux I'm in love with now...link takes you to a montage on Youtube).

 

I’m feeling smug, that’s right, don’t get between a poet and her words. It takes the length of the song for me to fully relax into adult land. Two hours later, on an inspiration high from brainstorming with my bloggers, I glance down at my phone to see I’ve missed five calls. My girl mixed up her destination cities, missed her boarding call, could I come pick her up. Followed by one last “Never mind” message--she was boarding a back-up flight.

My mom friends came to my emotional rescue (swiftly as Jagger’s fine Arab chargers) attempting to staunch the hemorrhage of mother guilt. Don’t take it so hard to heart, they said, this experience will give your daughter the opportunity to troubleshoot without you. They’re right--later my girl gleefully recounts the short journey from Lost to VIP. She asked for help, got an escorted tour of secret passageways between gates, and made it to her final destination in one piece.

Every time I think some kind of artificial boundary exists between my family life and my writing life (as if!), I learn again that they are inextricably braided. Earlier that afternoon, rushing to get my son across the school parking lot, so anxious to get on the road to the airport, I’d stopped in my tracks in front of a tree covered in pale grey curled layers of bark furling back on themselves. A writer’s dream of a tree offering its harvest of scrolls to the human eye. Some furls were soft, outer texture that of moth wings or wasp nests. Other furls were hard. That’s my son’s hand in the photo…we both lingered.

I took one more parting photo on the fly, and love how the tree seems to be dancing.

When I showed the photos to my friend Barbara Rockman (author of the poetry collection Sting and Nest), she tells me a childhood story about climbing her first tree. Which prompts me to ask...What is your tree story? Your tree poem? Which tree do you call home?

When my next teaching day rolls around, I’m thinking no problem—I can do this. No one has a flight to catch, I just need to teach a two hour class. But unfortunately, we find ourselves down a car—the van remains on the aerial jack at the shop awaiting new brakes and my husband has the night shift again. I’m set to hop on my bicycle to ride the five miles to town when my son comes to me clutching his throat. Something about a splinter in his throat…which turns out to be a sunflower seed wedged behind his tonsils.

Nothing my husband can’t eventually handle with a wooden spoon and salad tongs, though I’m not there to witness this practical tweaking of a favorite motto my husband has taught our family (improvise, adapt, overcome).  Next time we’ll just hit Intermediate Care (where we’d taken the youngest several weeks prior after he took an exuberant leap onto, and through, a hard plastic car travelling case. Withdrawing his leg left him with an eye-shaped tear below the knee which the doctor stapled shut for us, no problem).

Silver Strand Nature Discovery Trail, words by Edith Purer

Right or wrong, I rush once again out of the house, this time to the din of a gagging child. My savvy traveler, the teen back from her trip, sees me and says, “You’re teaching in that? You can’t wear that…” as if our roles were reversed, as if I were wearing a bikini to the library instead of modest blue striped sweats. No choice but to roll a dress around a pair of sandals, all the while muttering something about what else could possibly go wrong. In the garage, I discover my bicycle has a flat, so it’s off to ride on my son’s bike, knees skimming what’s left of my chest after breastfeeding those three kids when they were babies.

Then I’m free, loosed out into the elements on my chariot with a burning set of thighs, a fierce headwind, and the open miles of path along the Strand’s Discovery Nature Trail, the promise of bright minds in town on the other end.

I cycle to teach

Dusk and a dress on my back,

Spare shoes. Lessons too.

Related links:

I wrote the two haiku in this post in the Haiku Room, (a Facebook group of poets creating content while they play). Here are a few blogposts  in alphabetical order written by participating poets about various kinds of haiku joy:

Pam Helberg: X is for April Haiku Review
Lisa Rizzo, includes 17 haiku: Can you Haiku?
Ruth Thompson: The Haiku Room
Ellen Tumivacus: Thinking in Haiku

At Transformative Blogging: a guest post by Erica Goss: Fairytales, Facebook and Poetry Prompts about the way her book of poetry Prompts, Vibrant Words, grew out of her regular postings of prompts on Facebook. Also includes a beautiful poem of hers and a way for you to think about fairytales to inspire your writing.

June poetry reading:

I'm heading back to my home roots in Sonoma County this summer, and will be reading with Michelle Wing and Ruth Thompson at Moe's in Berkeley at the invitation of Poetry Flash. Would so love to see you there.

June 19, 2014
7:30 -9:30 p.m.

Link to event information and a map up at Poets and Writers.

In the works:

Ceramic handprint by Orion James, photo Robyn Beattie

Photo poem montage to accompany the poem Mordred’s Dream. The text of the poem is forthcoming online at Poetry Flash in May (and will also appear in my first poetry book, November Butterfly, due out in November 2014 from Saddle Road Press). Robyn and I are busy putting images to the soundtrack we recorded several  years ago (syncing beautiful flute by Lori O’Hara to sound recording of her stepson Ben Greenberg reading the poem for us).

Half-way through the micro-movie draft, our Siberian husky escaped from her bath. Somehow in her mad dash through the house, shaking and flinging water droplets everywhere, she hooked a pair of my daughter’s jeans across her back. When she swirled past me, the jeans snagged the power plug to my laptop and crashed the project.

T with Sisu, crasher of the poetry movie

But we now have a restored full working draft...I’m including one of the opening images here. I adore making these movies and feel so blessed to have Robyn’s eyes…she continues to expand my world by taking photos as she goes about her rich art-walk, camera ever in tow. She gives me the opportunity to congregate visually with artists I've yet to meet. I'll be sure to give you the link to our complete movie. To see the five other micro movies we made for Nefertiti, Lady Diana, Amelia, and Guinevere, visit my Youtube channel. To see more of Robyn's amazing photos: www.robynbeattie.com.

And here's the latest Perhaps, Maybe, written in collaboration with the lovely Liz Brennan:
Attempting the Impossible.

Ruth Thompson Joins the #MyWritingProcess Blog Tour

My trio of bloggers for the #MyWritingProcess blog tour just turned into a quartet...I am going to include Ruth's bio below to entice you over to her blog, and a few lines that will compel you to go read the rest:

 "Right now I’m working on a series of poems that go deeper into the experience of aging as expansion, rapture, rupture, explosion into wholeness."

 "I work a lot with archetypes, fairy tales, myths, especially myths of the feminine journey. Lately I’ve become more and more interested in the great mystery school traditions, including the Oracles at Delphi and elsewhere, which were originally goddess oracles..." Read Ruth's Entire Post.

 Need I say more? A girl after my own heart. Here's the nitty gritty bio:

 Ruth Thompson is the author of Woman With Crows (2013) and Here Along Cazenovia Creek (2011). Woman with Crows explored a new mythology of the divine feminine, from encounters with “hungry ghosts” to the fool-crone, “dancing what she does not know to dance.” It was a finalist for the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Prize, and includes poems that won the New Millennium Writings Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler prize.

Ruth’s chapbook Here Along Cazenovia Creek was the basis for “The Seasons,” a collaborative performance of poetry and dance with the great Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu.  (Video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rw8VakPHig and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrTADPq3o64) 

Ruth grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Indiana University. In a previous life, she was a college dean in Los Angeles. She now lives in Hilo, Hawai’i with writer-anthropologist Don Mitchell. She teaches writing, and meditation, yoga, and writing workshops throughout the US, and blogs about happiness at http://www.ruththompson.net/.

And if you missed my original My Writing Process blog tour post, you can find it here:

 First Poetry Book Publication, Reckoning with Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking.

Related reading:

Ruth also happens to be my editor at Saddle Road Press; she's a delightful editor, offering guidance and smart feedback...here's a post about Ruth's careful eye (among other things) and how she sent me to the Wild Carrot Museum online in order to complete Revising Guinevere.
 

Outwitting Gravity: The Leap, The Blog Tour, and Forthcoming Poems

I had a dream of dancing in such a way gravity was arrested when my feet left the floor in the ecstasy of whirling from one side of the room to the other. At the height of each leap, arms would extend in grip of midleap and body linger motionless.

Couldn’t help but liken the sensation to writing…the way we outwit time, taking the moment of the poem’s core and drawing it out in words for so much longer than the instant in real time.

I had this dream the night before I received the news that one of my poems, Black Angel, Scripted, Never Shot (referencing Iowa City's beloved Black Angel), is forthcoming at Soundings East and was a runner-up for the Claire Keyes Poetry Competition.  Also in the dream was another figure I couldn’t make out, keeping pace with my spinning across the floor. I like to think it was my sister, featured in the poem, in a parallel image of spinning I can share with you via the fall issue of Soundings East.

Poet Scott Withiam was the other runner-up and the winning poet was Amy Pence. While the poems chosen for Soundings East obviously won’t be available until the fall, I couldn’t resist putting up an existing poem trail for the other poets: For runner up Scott Withiam: Sweet Talking (Drunken Boat) and The Petty Snow (Rattle). And for winner Amy Pence: Age Defying, 1976 (Drunken Boat) and Cyclamens  and Pink Jasmine (storySouth).

On other “taking the leap” fronts, up on my main Transformative Blogging Site is a post for the #MyWritingProcess Blog Tour; I am grateful to Marilyn Bousquin of Writing Women’s Lives for the invitation. Here’s a link to
First Poetry Book Publication, Reckoning with Exposure, and Astral Rubbernecking. I’ll be adding links to the posts by the three bloggers I invited to carry the tour forward. Here’s one up already today by my writing colleague, friend and collaborating blogger at Mother, Writer, Mentor, Jessica Powers in which she talks about a new collaborative writing project she is undertaking with her brother. And here's the second, by my friend Edith O'Nuallain (writer, blogger, reviewer) at In a Room of My Own: ruminations on the writing process of a writer mama. (April 18 update: And here's the link for the third of my trio of bloggers, by my friend and writer Marlene Samuels in which she discusses how she writes about her family's experience of the Holocaust, how she writes across genres, and her interview project about women's regrets.)

Where are you "taking the leap" in your writing life? How and where did you get the courage to leap?

I'd love to know. It takes a village to raise a writer.

 Photo:

Taken by my daughter, Instagram's Queen of photography and videos on the fly.

Other forthcoming poems:

Thumbelina at NonBinary Review.

Mordred's Dream at Poetry Flash (and I'm hoping to have the corresponding micro-movie complete by May 1).

Other Related Links:

Poems by Claire Keyes (@ Women Writers), White Water (Redheaded Stepchild)

An essay by Claire Keyes: Marianne Boruch and The Art of Surprise (Valparaiso Poetry Review)

A review by Claire Keyes: Dream Cabinet by Ann Fisher-Wirth (Blackbird)
 

 

Do you Haiku?

Come play with me tomorrow at San Diego Writers, Ink, over at Inspirations Gallery. I've been busy ferreting out my favorite haiku to put in a hat for us to read...and reading versions of Basho's opening paragraph of Narrow Road to the Interior. After perusing my finds, we will fearlessly write our own stellar haiku and haibun and more...The list of forms we are trying our hand at writing is, I admit, daunting...

Haiku

Haibun

Aubade

Letter or Epistolary Poems

Sestina

Sonnet

Villanelle.

...and I'm not sure anyone has ever written seven poems before in those seven forms in a four hour window, but we could be the first. I'm new to San Diego Writers, Ink and this will be my debut class for them...help me put down my writing roots in my new city.

 Class runs from 12:30 to 4:30; sign up here if you are interested:

 Poetry Play: A Tour Through the Forms

 

 

April Courses: Beginning Blogging, Poetry Workshop, and a Tarot Writing Exercise for You

Thursdays April 10-May 22: Beginning Blogging, Coronado Adult Education:

I’m looking for two more San Diego area or Coronado bloggers to round out my beginning blogging class through Coronado Adult Education. The course runs on Thursday evenings from 6:00-8:00 p.m. starting April 10th through May 22nd (7 weeks) for $77 or $69 for Sr.  To register, visit Coronado Adult Education's Website.

Course description:

 This course offers beginning bloggers the chance to create material to launch a blog or to recalibrate an existing blog through completing a series of writing exercises and inventories. We look at blog platforms and blog technique; we also preview the Web for examples. We create content, discuss image use, and refer to a checklist towards blog launch. Students will emerge with sample posts and a map in hand for how to proceed in the future. While students may bring laptops or iPads to class, I welcome writers and bloggers at all stages of comfort level with technology, so please bring a notebook and pencil to each class (laptop/ipad not required).

Saturday, April 12: Poetry Play: A Tour of the Forms

I’ll also be braving it across the blue bridge for my first time teaching for San Diego Writers, Ink—this 4 hour workshop is slated for Saturday April 12 and runs $60 for SDWI members and $72 for non-members. I hope you’ll come out for a wild ride through as many forms as we can get to during our workshop. To register, visit San Diego Writers, Ink. Course description:

Do you haiku? Every written a haibun, aubade, or epistolary poem? Want to try your hand at a sestina, sonnet, or villanelle? During this four-hour 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, or aubades, for a love lost or left at sunrise. And then, hearts astir, we turn to the letter form: if you could write a letter to anyone, placed at any juncture in time, who would you address?

The last three of our forms—sestina, sonnet, and villanelle—present challenges of rhyme and word repetition and more, but fear not: we will map out a potential course for poems you’ll write later on your own. Bring a notebook and pen; writers across the spectrum welcome, including absolute beginners. While I will provide examples of each form, please feel free to bring in favorite poems written in these forms to share with the group. Come out and play!

A Writing Exercise for You to Try:

Earth, Air, Fire and Water: Using the Tarot to Inspire Your Writing Practice is a guest post I wrote for Jan Marquet, a colleague at Story Circle Network, live at “Free the Pen.” It is a gentle way to begin to understand the structure that most Tarot Decks use at their basis for the Minor Mentors. This exercise encourages us to start with our own experience of the four elements before turning to the cards for depictions of how our experiences of the elements might manifest.