"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty

Archive for August, 2016

Before I Hit the Road Call for Submissions Love <3 Light Journal

Light Journal – Be Part of the Inaugural Issue!

Deadline: September 30, 2016

 

Light will be a journey of emotion through photography and poetry. It will feature the work of established and emerging photographers and poets. The theme for the inaugural issue is Human. It’s a bit of a challenge. We identify humanity with countless topics. There are many ways to make the “human-ness” of our situations personal, beautiful, and memorable. But how do we take what’s so familiar and make it fresh and surprising? We’re looking for photography and poetry that investigate the theme. Give us your boldest, slyest, most inquisitive visions of the human. 

Website: www.light-journal.com

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

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Sometimes the List is the Prompt, or the Prompt is the List :-)

23 August 2016

I’m getting ready for a week’s worth of travel, so it’s all about making lists this morning. 

Make a list (to do, shopping, wishes), then use the list as inspiration. Try to include most of the things you put on the list into what you write. 

List

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

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Daily Prompt Catch-Up! Heat, and Travel, and the Child You Were

 

18 August 2016

Gettin that August blast of summer heat!

“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.”~Violette Leduc

Make art about relentless heat.

august heat

19 August 2016
So I stood in my yard today and watched a truck hauling a trailer lose control just long enough to smash my mailbox to smithereens.19 August 2016

Make art about witnessing destruction.

Mailbox

20 August 2016

Visiting with family and looking through some newly discovered old family photographs, including some I’d never seen of that wild lil girl I was 🙂

Make art about yourself as a child.

me and a tree

21 August 2016

My sons helped me shuck, cut, and can six dozen ears of corn today. It’s a messy job, but now the house smells like caramel corn, and we have yummy summer in a jar for those cold winter months.

Make art about a task that’s hard, but worth it.

corn

22 August 2016

I’m headed out later this week for a spiritual retreat and a couple of road trip visits with family. Excited, but fretting over getting all my stuff ready.

Make art about preparing to travel.

cat suitcase

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops

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Monday Must Read! Karen Craigo: No More Milk

karen craigoThis week meet the fabulous Karen Craigo. Karen is the author of the poetry collection No More Milk (Sundress Publications, 2016), as well as the forthcoming collection Passing Through Humansville (ELJ Publications, 2017). Her poetry and essays appear in numerous journals, and she is the author of two chapbooks,Someone Could Build Something Here (Winged City, 2013) and Stone for an Eye (Kent State/Wick, 2004).

Karen teaches writing in Springfield, Missouri.

Visit Karen’s Website

http://betterviewofthemoon.blogspot.com/

Get Karen’s Books!

No More Milk

https://squareup.com/store/sundress-publications/item/no-more-milk-by-karen-craigo-pre-order?square_lead=item_embed

Stone for an Eye

https://www.amazon.com/Stone-Eye-Wick-Poetry-Chapbook/dp/0873388038/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1471865341&sr=8-2&keywords=karen+craigo

Praise for No More Milk

Despite the seeming refusal implied by No More Milk, there’s vast generosity in these poems, a sense of holiness in even the smallest of gestures. Holy, but not numinous: these are embodied prayers, “in praise of what’s left/ and all the hands it has known,” the kind that makes you “bow beneath the burden of words.” There is a profound personal morality at stake for this poet who loves the people and things of this earth in all their itchy-butt blessedness, “the slugs/ as much as the lilacs,” who manages to sing like “the bird/ that has made us rise…/…yesterday’s anger/ reduced to syllables in the air.” Alleluia.
—Heidi Czerwiec, author of Self-Portrait as Bettie Page and Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle

Read More from Karen Online

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/41424

http://atticusreview.org/featured-poet-karen-craigo/

http://www.connotationpress.com/hoppenthaler-s-congeries/2015-08-19-18-45-41/january-2014/2166-karen-craigo-poetry

http://www.radarpoetry.com/issue-2-contributors/

https://asitoughttobe.com/2013/11/30/saturday-poetry-series-presents-karen-craigo/

http://www.barrelhousemag.com/blogall/2016/2/4/negative-creep-by-karen-craigo

http://www.diodepoetry.com/v7n3/content/craigo_k.html

http://www.tupeloquarterly.com/does-the-road-run-east-or-west-by-karen-craigo/

Interviews

https://sundresspublications.wordpress.com/2016/06/07/interview-with-karen-craigo/

http://www.rappahannockreview.com/interviews/rappahannock-review-contributor-spotlight-interview-with-karen-craigo/

http://mcblogs.montgomerycollege.edu/potomacreview/2015/08/13/duplicated-qa-with-poet-karen-craigo/

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, poetry, Writing

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Some MidWeek Call for Submissions Love <3 Foliate Oak

Foliate Oak Seeks Strangely Beautiful Work

Deadline: October 1, 2016

 

Foliate Oak Literary Magazine wants your best writing, art, and photography. We are seeking submissions from contributors who we have not previously published. Please read our guidelines before submitting:www.foliateoak.com/submit.html.

From their guidelines:

“We love previously unpublished quirky writing that makes sense, preferably flash fiction (less than 1000 words). We are eager to read short creative nonfiction also. We rarely accept submissions that have over 2700 words. We enjoy poems that we understand, preferably not rhyming poems, unless you make the rhyme so fascinating we’ll wonder why we ever said anything about avoiding rhymes. Give us something fresh, unexpected, and will make us say, “Wow!” We’re not interested in homophobic, religious rants, or pornographic, violent stories. 

Please:  No genre (sci-fi, fantasy, fan fiction).”

Website: http://www.foliateoak.com/

More on their Guidelines and Submission here!

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, fiction, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, poetry, publishing, Writing

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Daily Prompt Love <3 Talk Poverty

17 August 2016 

US Poverty Rates as of 2014

For more information, visit Talk Poverty

Overall Poverty Rate: 14.8%

Percentage of people who fell below the poverty line—$23,834 for a family of four—in 2014

Twice the Poverty Level: 33.4%

Percent of people who fell below twice the poverty line—$47,668 for a family of four—in 2014

Half the Poverty Level: 6.6%

Percent of people who fell below half the poverty line—$11,917 for a family of four—in 2014

Child Poverty Rate: 21.1%

Percentage of children under age 18 who fell below the poverty line in 2014

African American Poverty Rate: 26.2%

Percentage of African Americans who fell below the poverty line in 2014

Hispanic Poverty Rate: 23.6%

Percentage of Hispanics who fell below the poverty line in 2014

White Poverty Rate: 10.1%

Percentage of non-Hispanic Whites who fell below the poverty line in 2014

Native American Poverty Rate: 28.3%

Percentage of Native Americans who fell below the poverty line in 2014

People with Disabilities Poverty Rate: 28.5%

Percentage of people with disabilities who fell below the poverty line in 2014

Make art about poverty. 

poverty ghandi

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, Food, freedom, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

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Poetry House Concert Happiness! Scott Depot WV <3 Thanks to Mary Imo Stike and John Stike <3

I was in West Virginia this past weekend for a house concert style poetry reading in Scott Depot WV, hosted by the kind and generous Mary Imo Stike and John Stike 🙂 The mountains as always were beautiful, my hosts warm and lovely, and the audience, around twenty-two people in attendance–were spirited and funny and smart and a very eclectic talented bunch themselves, in sooo many ways! We were also blessed with the beautiful musical talents of The Wild Hares! Awesome, funny, Doug, Jim, and Mike rocked the tunes before and after the reading 🙂

The conversation after the reading was just amazing! Talk of–yes, poetry :-)–but also of physics and spirituality, language and issues of class bias, tradition and preservation, the search for truth in so many ways beyond academia. I learned–and laughed :-)–with every conversation. I felt blessed to be in their presence. And twenty more copies of my crazy books out into the world! 🙂 Thank you, Mary and John, and thank you, West Virginia, for an incredible reading experience! 

I do believe these house readings, the revival of the salon, are crucial to the future of poetry. So many readers and thinkers and lovers of words outside the insulated walls of academia! I’m grateful for that, and I can’t wait to meet more of them! ❤ 

Some of my favorite pics from the trip 🙂 ❤

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Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, book tour, Books, Creativity, Dreams, Family, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Music, One Love, poetry, Readings, Writing

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Daily Prompt <3 Facing the Past in Order to Heal

16 August 2016

Many nations with atrocities in their past—Germany, Rwanda, South Africa—prominently recognize their painful history with memorials, museums, and monuments. This kind of trutful recognition, acknowledgement, helps with healing.

We have yet to do that in the United States. As Jessica Leber writes in the linked article below, “Even today, the nation is largely silent about one of its historical periods of shame: the thousands of lynchings that terrorized southern blacks right up until the Civil Rights era.”

We can do this, y’all. We can be brave enough to face our own nightmares. We have to, if we are, as a nation, going to heal and come together. 

“The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama organization led by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, has, for the last few years, been working to place historical markers at lynching sites all around the country. At TED’s conference this week, the group showed a sneak preview of plans for a new national memorial to the victims of lynching that they hope to break ground on some time this year in Montgomery, Alabama.

“In America, we’re not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises us. It constrains us,” says Stevenson. “We have to create a new relationship with this history.”

Make art about facing, acknowledging, being accountable for, hard truths about the past.

______________________________________________________________

Read here about a new building project designed to break this national silence.

This Stunning National Memorial Would Recognize America’s Legacy of Lynchings

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

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So Excited and Grateful! Readings Upcoming This Fall!

Grateful to some generous lovely people for hosting readings for my crazy lil prose poems 🙂 Upcoming readings this fall,  from A Little Blood, A Little Rain (FutureCycle Press 2016), Trailer Park Oracle (Kelsay Books 2016), and The Night I Heard Everything (FutureCycle Press 2015).

August 13 – Scott Depot, WV, Hosted by Mary Imo and John Stike

October 1 – Heritage Village, Calhoun County Park, Grantsville, WV, Hosted by Lisa Hayes Minney

October 19 – Longwood University Writers Reading Series, Farmville VA

October 26 – Waterbean Reading Series, Waterbean Coffee, NorthCross Shopping Center 9705 Sam Furr Rd., Ste A, Huntersville, NC

December 5 – Readings on Roslyn, Winston Salem, NC, Hosted by Kathryn Milam

 

Grateful especially to these generous hosts, and to the publishers who made these books possible ❤

Diane Kistner, Robert S. King, and all the great folks at FutureCycle Press

and

Karen Kelsay Davies, Editor of all All Things at Kelsay Books and Aldrich Press

Please check out their whole beautiful catalogs!

If you’re interested in hosting a reading or event, please contact me at carrollhackettma@gmail.com  

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, book tour, Books, Creativity, Dreams, freedom, Gratitude, Love, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops

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Daily Prompt Love! <3 Mountains, and Mystery, and Music–Oh My! :-)

 

13 August 2016

Headed off to wild and wonderful West Virginia for a reading. Driving through these amazing Appalachian mountains always fills me with such awe.

Make art about the mysteries felt in mountains.

WV aug 2016

14 August 2016

Road Angel named Bay, a very large beautiful young man working as a cashier in a roadside stop, his smile like a bright bright beacon, caught me doing a lil dance in the aisle to the BeeGees piping in overhead. He grinned and immediately started dancing too 😀 So we finished out Stayin Alive while I paid 🙂

Make art about dancing with strangers. 🙂

dancing with strangers

15 August 2016

Feeling this this morning, the music.

“Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song/in my own breath”~Philip Levine

Make art about the music you hear, in anything, in everything.

music in everything

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, book tour, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Music, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

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