"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 the ‘fiction’ Category

Daily Prompt Love <3 Inspired by Congress

4 May 2017

Make art about

betrayal

Better Late Than Never Daily Prompt Love <3 Beautiful Creatures

3 May 2017

Every day I sling the door open to my classroom, and enter, looking across the room at those amazing students, and greet them with”Good morning, you beautiful creatures!”

I hadn’t thought much about it, until apparently I missed a day greeting them this way, and I heard about it 🙂 “You didn’t call us beautiful creatures!”

And they are–so beautiful–these young creatures striving, focusing, questioning, and reaching, always reaching, even when they’re not sure yet what it is they’re reaching for. Some stumble, and fall. Some create the wind itself as they move from place to place. Others are much too hard on themselves, harder than we old people could be, harder even than the unbelievable media and family and societal pressure they carry on their young shoulders every day.  They are creatures of grace, and incredible endurance, surviving, thriving even. in the mess we’ve left them.

They are dreamfog and summer storm and mountain clay and stardust. They are every road to everywhere, every path woven of hope and young hunger.

They are miraculous, these creatures, these wind dancers and fireaters, carrying their huge hearts out openly before them in their hands, offering them  like gifts, like the gifts that they are. ❤

They’re funny, and they’re compassionate, and they’re curious, and wise, so much wiser than they’re given credit for, than they give themselves credit for, and I learn from them every time we’re together in those rooms. Every day they teach me, so I never forget what it is to dream.

Tonight, we shared a meal, and I listened to presentations for projects ranging from the environmental and natural–water quality, animal rescue, waste conversion for fuel–to a cross-section of the humane–programs for kids in poverty, kids with disabilities, for educating kids in technology, free financial services for students and for the poor, projects to help the hungry.

Tonight, I saw the future, y’all 🙂 and no matter how hard it seems right now, that future? It is indeed filled with beautiful, beautiful, beautiful creatures.

Make art about young people, about what we owe them, about what we can learn from them. 

angel children

Daily Prompt Love <3 Ignorance

2 May 2017

Make art inspired by this quote. 

ignorance violence

Daily Prompt Love <3 Shame

1 May 2017

Read a story this morning about lunchrooms shaming poor children.

I cried for an hour. The scars of shame run so deep, follow us into adulthood, undermine the beauty and power of who we are at every turn, if it’s not healed. 

“I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.”― Judy Collins

Make art about childhood shame, about seeing that hurt child in your adult eyes, about healing shame. 

Daily Prompt Love <3 Ways of Knowing

30 April 2017

I asked for a dream before going to sleep last night, a dream that would help me to solve a problem, answer a question I had. In the ways in which I was raised, dreams were just one of multiple ways of learning, ways of knowing.

Unlike mainstream Western culture, which tends to limit ‘knowing’ to what is categorized as ‘rational,’ indigenous cultures across the globe recognize multiple sources of knowledge an individual or community possess and can access, including traditional wisdom, dreaming, land knowing, symbols and images, shared knowledge through connectivity, and story, among others.

Make art about ways of knowing. 

ways of knowing

 

Daily Prompt Love <3 Strange Courage

29 April 2017

“It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part”
― William Carlos Williams

Make art about a moment calling for strange courage. 

star

Friday Call for Submissions Love <3 Cahoodaloodaling: Solitude’s Spectrum

Cahoodaloodaling

A quarterly themed journal 

Website: http://cahoodaloodaling.com/

Guest Editor James H. Duncan
______________________________________________________
“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.” —Hemingway
 
Solitude—whether alone on the road in a car, train, motel room, or a forest trail, or even secluded and tucked away in your home, whether it’s a welcomed moment of peacefulness or a lonely state of despair—times of solitude shape us, recharge us, and break us down to our essence. Sometimes we choose to step away from the world. Sometimes the world breaks us and casts us aside. In those moments alone, if we make the choice to continue and create, true artists are born. We cross a border we cannot uncross and heal through our words, finding ourselves—and sometimes finding new selves in the process. As Hemingway said, sometimes we’re strong in those broken places, and sometimes we’re not. Sometimes that jagged broken part affects us forever afterward.
This fall issue we are interested in capturing both the positive, reaffirming pieces about solitude along with those that reveal pain, heartbreak, and introspection. We seek to investigate those breaking point moments, those halting discoveries, those empowered decisions that compel us to walk away from the world and to let the silt settle in the pool of water in our soul. Whether you enjoy locking yourself away or you had to in order to save yourself from hell, we want to hear how these moments lead to creative revelations and re-energized focus, or how they still haunt you to this day.

 

Submissions due 9/9/17. Issue live 10/31/17.  Read guidelines for submissions at:

Daily Prompt Love <3 Your Song

28 April 2017

“Every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing.

Before we make music, music makes us.”~Joachim-Ernst Berendt

Make art about the song you recognize as yours, the song of the body.

heart song

 

 

Daily Prompt Love <3 Where Would You Go?

27 April 2017

Make art about time travel.

time travel

Daily Prompt Love <3 Greening

26 April 2017

The rains have stopped and and the hadrwoods have awakened, and the drive home from campus today was a wander through every shade of green. The Guardian Oak is full and bright, and the woods are thickening. I stood with giants, all of us reaching for the sky.

Make art about the greening. 

oaks

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