Daily Prompt Love <3 Facing the Darkness
21 November 2016
Make art about facing the darkness, even, especially our own.
Archive for the ‘Bless the Day’ Category
Monday Must Read! Naomi Ayala: Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations
The beautiful Naomi Ayala was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States in her teens, eventually earning an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Writing in both Spanish and English, she is author of the poetry collections Wild Animals on the Moon, chosen by the New York City Public Library as a 1999 Book for the Teen Age, This Side of Early, and this week’s recommended read, Calling Home:Praise Songs and Incantations. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Boriquén to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium (2007), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2006), and First Flight: 24 Latino Poets (2006).
An educator and arts administrator interested in environmental causes, Ayala has received numerous awards, including the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award, and the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Ayala has been a visiting humanities scholar for Hermana a Hermana/Sister to Sister and was co-chair of the board of directors for the organization Change: Building Social Justice, Starting in the Classroom; she co-founded the New Haven Alliance for Arts and Cultures. A former resident of Washington, DC, she currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and works as a freelance writer, educational consultant, and teaching artist.
Buy Naomi’s beautiful books!
Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations
http://bilingualpress.clas.asu.edu/book/calling-home
This Side of Early
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/side-early
Wild Animals on the Moon
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wild-animals-moon-and-other-poems
Read More from Naomi Online
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53007
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala.html
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/nayala.html
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala4.html
http://www.nathanielturner.com/naomiayalabio.htm
http://www.anomalouspress.org/current/25.ayala.winter.php
http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2010/11/poem-of-week-naomi-ayala.html
Interviews
http://www.eethelbertmiller.com/muse/ayala.html
http://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/pablo-miguel-martinez-interviews-naomi.html
Interview for the Oral History Program at the Institute for Latino Studies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdLwaN2ez8
Hear Naomi Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isocCGT-hFQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZKJpqAIAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPkGvwHjFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5zfe-f9kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84jhZutUlWo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMXD7mY3uc
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
Daily Prompt Love <3 One Body, Many Parts
12 There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body…13 We were all baptized by one Holy Spirit. And so we are formed into one body. It didn’t matter whether we were Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free people. We were all given the same Spirit to drink. 14 So the body is not made up of just one part. It has many parts.
15 Suppose the foot says, “I am not a hand. So I don’t belong to the body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of the body. 16 And suppose the ear says, “I am not an eye. So I don’t belong to the body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, how could it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how could it smell? 18 God has placed each part in the body just as he wanted it to be. 19 If all the parts were the same, how could there be a body?20 As it is, there are many parts. But there is only one body.
21 The eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” The head can’t say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 22 In fact, it is just the opposite. The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are the ones we can’t do without. 23 The parts that we think are less important we treat with special honor.–1 Corinthians 12:12-23 New International Reader’s Version (NIRV)
Make art about Connectedness, the inescapability of how we are all connected.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Janus at the Gate
11/19/2016
Dreamt a conversation with a friend last night about the ancient Roman god Janus. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.
Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and is associated with progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, and of one universe to another.
Make art about Janus, or about gateways, doorways, transitions from past to future, from one world to another.
Daily Prompt Love <3 No Irish Need Apply
11/18/2016
Thinking on how it wasn’t all that long ago that it was my Irish ancestors that many people wanted out of the country, saw as less than human, thought they were taking their jobs, hated for their faith and their culture.
Make art about fear and exclusion.
Some MidWeek Call for Submissions: Unleash It, Y’all <3
Submit Your Personal Essays to The Artist Unleashed
Deadline: Rolling
Website: http://www.theartistunleashed.com/
Earn $0.015 per word to be published on our blog, The Artist Unleashed. We want articles based on your personal experience as a writer or artist to help fellow creatives. Articles for this website must be about an aspect of writing and/or art and must also inspire and/or motivate, encourage discussion, offer advice or argue an opinion, and be rich with informative/engaging content. We will tweet and Facebook your post to get it as much exposure as possible. Unique views on a single post have reached 1500+ within 24 hours. Please visit our website for guidelines: theartistunleashed.com/write-for-us.
Daily Prompt Love <3 What We Need to Hear
11/17/2016
I called my beloved brother, my late husband’s brother, for advice early yesterday, and in the way he has that I love and respect and admire and need so much, he started by saying, “You may not like the advice I have to give. You might get mad at me.”
I laughed, and said, “I’m not gonna get mad. That’s why I called you.”
Later last night I texted him Thank you. He called and asked, “So did my cantankerous advice work out?”
I laughed again, and said, “Sure did. Thank you so much.”
He said, “Don’t thank me. It’s you. All you. Just sometimes, even when we know what’s right, what we need to do, we just need someone else to say it, to say what’s hard to hear.”
Yep.
Make art about hearing hard truths.
Daily Prompt Love <3
11/16/2016
Make art about focus, about losing focus, about regaining focus, about staying focused.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Convergence
11/15/2016
“There is no other space, no other time. This moment is all. In this moment the whole existence converges. In this moment all is available.”-Osho
Make art about convergence.
Daily Prompt Love <3 Dissent
11/14/2016
early 15c., from Latin dissentire “differ in sentiments, disagree, be at odds, contradict, quarrel,” from dis- “differently” (see dis-) + sentire “to feel, think” (see sense (n.)).
Related: Dissented; dissenting. The noun is 1580s, from the verb.
Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime. [Jacob Bronowski “Science and Human Values,” 1956]
Make art about dissent.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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