8/24/2015
Daily Prompt
Woke up feeling like life’s full of promise 🙂 So many dreams last night, but all that remains are shining fragments 🙂
Make art about fragments.
Monday Must Read! Diana Whitney: Wanting It
August 23, 2015
Monday Must Read!
This week meet Diana Whitney. Diana’s first book of poetry, Wanting It, was released in 2014 by Harbor Mountain Press and became an indie bestseller. Wanting It won the Rubery International Book Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award here in the US. Diana is the poetry columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the winner of the 2015 Women’s National Book Association poetry prize, selected by Ellen Bass. She is grateful to have received grants and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center.
Diana’s poems, essays, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Crab Orchard Review, The Rumpus, Mud Season Review, and many more. Her irreverent parenting column, Spilt Milk, was syndicated for years, ran as a public radio commentary series, and is currently being collected into a risky memoir about motherhood and sexuality. A yoga teacher by trade, Diana blogs about the darker side of mothering for The Huffington Post and runs a yoga studio in Brattleboro, Vermont, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and thirteen chickens.
Visit Diana’s website: www.diana-whitney.com
Get Diana’s book:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780988275522/wanting-it.aspx
Reviews of Diana’s book, Wanting It:
Gulf Coast Magazine:
http://gulfcoastmag.org/online/blog/wanting-it,-a-review/
Coal Hill Review:
http://www.coalhillreview.com/book-review-wanting-it-by-diana-whitney/
Read Diana’s work online:
New poems:
Mud Season Review
http://mudseasonreview.com/2015/07/poetry-issue-11/
One: Jacar Press
http://one.jacarpress.com/?s=Diana+Whitney#Diana%20Whitney
Book Reviews:
http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Poetry-John-Burnside-Jane-Hirshfield-Rebecca-6401935.php
Essays:
http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/08/10/kissing-essay-diana-whitney/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diana-whitney/raising-a-rock-star_b_5888600.html
Author interviews:
http://mudseasonreview.com/2015/07/you-never-know-when-youre-working/
http://www.penparentis.org/interview-with-poet-diana-whitney/
Happy reading!
xo
Mary
8/23/2015
Daily Prompt
Last night I dreamt of so so many shining spoons, too many spoons to choose from 🙂 Someone I love stood at my side and laughed indulgently at my excitement about all of those spoons LOL
Make art about spoons. 🙂
Friday Call for Submissions Love!
Clockhouse
About
Dare. Risk. Dream. Share. Ruminate.
How do we understand our place in the world, our responsibility to it, and our responsibility to each other? Clockhouse is an eclectic conversation about the work-in-progress of life—a soul arousal, a testing ground, a new community, a call for change. Join in.
Guidelines
Clockhouse accepts works of poetry, fiction, memoir, creative nonfiction, and dramatic works for stage or screen. We encourage submissions from both established and emerging writers.
All submissions must:
- Be original, unpublished work written by the author
- Follow the industry-standard formatting guidelines appropriate for the genre as well as the applicable guidelines below:
- Fiction: Short stories and self-contained novel excerpts in a literary style. Genre fiction will be considered only if it sustains literary merit (Up to 5,000 words)
- Poetry: All poetry in traditional and experimental styles including prose poetry (Up to 250 lines)
- Memoir and Creative Nonfiction: All memoir and creative nonfiction in traditional and experimental literary styles. No academic or scientific essays (Up to 5,000 words)
- Dramatic Work for Stage or Screen: Short dramatic works in traditional and experimental styles, either a standalone piece or an excerpt from a one-act or full length play or screenplay (Up to 15 pages)
- Include a short bio of approximately 100 words or less
- Include a brief artist statement: a few sentences about your work as an artist (i.e., not a “pitch” for this submission, but rather a statement about what you’re interested in writing about now, what drives your writing, or how your writing is reflecting or influencing the world at large, etc.)
- Be submitted only through our online submission manager (see link at bottom of page). No email submissions will be accepted
Submissions that do not follow these guidelines will be discarded unread.
Submission period for the Summer 2016 issue opens on August 15, 2015 and closes at 11:59 p.m. on December 1, 2015.
See more at Clockhouse website: http://clockhouse.net/main/
New Writing Workshop! Writing the Forgotten Feminine
August 19, 2015
So excited! 🙂 Along with the fabulous MeLaina Elise Ramos, I’m thrilled to be offering a brand new writing workshop! At the beach!
Writing the Forgotten Feminine:
Giving Voice to the Disregarded, Unsung, or Silenced Woman
A One-Day Writing Workshop in beautiful Grandview Beach, Hampton, VA 23664
September 19, 2015, 9am-5pm
Whether you’re drawn to the women left out of history books or that aunt in the family no one speaks of, or even your own woman-self, subverted, forgotten, or neglected in the demands of work, parenting, or relationships, the feminine voice is one of complexity, knowing, and power that spans all of human history.
And we want to hear it ring!
Join us for a gathering in which the mystery, the humor, the wisdom, and especially the strength of the feminine voice is celebrated and empowered.
Led by two women writers at different stages in their own work and lives, but who share a deep respect and interest in reclaiming the voices of forgotten or silenced women, this workshop will include readings on and by women who’ve been left out, as well as tons of prompts and exercises specifically designed to help you tap into and strengthen the feminine voice in your writing.
and….we cook for you! Lunch is included 🙂
$75 includes one-day workshop, tons of prompts and exercises, a take-away packet of reading and resource materials, and gifts created just for you.
If interested, email at vaprlover@gmail.com & carrollhackettma@gmail.com for details.
Please share!
The beauty of the universe dances in your eyes. I hear her singing every time you laugh. You are Beautiful. You are Creation.
8/19/2015
Daily Prompt
“The brain, like the earth, lies in layers”~Patricia Kirkpatrick
Make art about layers, literal or metaphorical, or use structural imagery and build a piece of art–poem, painting, essay, story–itself in layers.
My mama kept a garden to feed us kids when I was growing up. We were poor, but nowhere near as poor as my mother had been as a child, growing up as she did back in those beautiful North Carolina mountains in the Depression era.
One of the reasons I can is to remind myself to be grateful. I think about how this was the only way my grandmother–we called her Miz Pearl–had to feed my mama and her brothers and sisters, and how she’d work all summer so they would have anything to eat at all in the winter. One hard winter the only thing they had at all were the green beans Miz Pearl had canned the summer before. So as I’m working, I’m thinking how lucky most of us are, to have access to food in ways that the generations before us did not. I’m not rich by any stretch, and I do love my home food, but I have never been hungry, not truly, because of women who put up food this way, who had that wisdom.
So i’m grateful. and really really aware of how I don’t need this food to live, how I don’t have to haul water up from the creek, how I don’t have to build a fire to cook, how hard, how so so so hard, those women before us worked to care for –just to feed–their families.
I’m even more grateful, and excited, because for the first time, my sons, my oldest J, who is 26, and his younger brother Dean–the one I call Manchild 🙂 just months away from his 21st birthday– have asked to learn how to preserve food by the old canning methods. Even Manchild’s best friend Colin wants to learn! So I’m one Happy Hippie Mama right now 🙂
The web of cultures in which I was raised teaches us to honor the wisdom of elders, to honor and appreciate the wisdom born of survival and innovation and ingenuity developed over thousands of years walked by the procession before us. It teaches us to honor what sustains us, the planet, and our community. I am excited to share this with my sons, with these young people. I am honored, and humbled, to have the chance to teach this way of Loving as it was taught to me.
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Daily Prompt
“Oh my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways. And deep ways and steep ways, and high ways, and low.”~Henry Lawson
Make art inspired by old wisdom.
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“When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. … Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition.”― Thích Nhất Hạnh
Monday Must Read!
This week, meet Therése Halscheid. Therése’s new book Frozen Latitudes (Press 53), won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, HM for Poetry. Other collections include Uncommon Geography,Without Home, Powertalk, and a Greatest Hits chapbook award.
Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, among them The Gettysburg Review,Tampa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge.
By way of house-sitting, she has lived the life of an itinerant writer. Her travels have taken her from a swamp in the Florida Panhandle to the Arctic north of Alaska, where she lived with and taught an Eskimo Inupiaq tribe.
Visit Therése’s website: www.ThereseHalscheid.com
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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