Daily Prompt Love <3 Even If Your Voice Shakes
24 July 2019
Make art about the truth-tellers.
Archive for the ‘One Love’ Category
Daily Prompt Love <3 Facing It
23 July 2019
Make art about confrontation, about confronting someone or something, about avoiding confrontation, or about a time when confrontation was healthy.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Pond Water & Mud <3 Sharing a poem from my latest book (Un)Hinged
Thanks to Sammy Greenspan and all the good folks at Kattywompus Press ❤ Here’s a peek into this odd, little book ❤
Woman Made of Pond Water and Mud
mouth o’ing like fish, fighting for breath in the run-off, in the sludge, in what’s left
of the autumn light gold-slicking the green green surface. She fights to recall what it means to keep breathing.
Meaning is, she knows, manufactured, manufacturing, making, made. What will
we construct today, this day where cold rain pools all across the yard, and where
the gathering dark makes it hard for even the slightest steps of dreaming?
As a child she learned early to clean fish, buckets of struggle she and her brothers carried
home from the creek, the pond, the river, home to the scrape, the knife, the filet,
the tweezer pull of pin bones, careful delicate extractions, lessons in vigilance,
before her mama’s sure hands transformed their catch into sustenance.
She never could look in there, in the pail, couldn’t watch as those fish–
bass, stripe, crappie, cats–fought so hard, banged in circles against the smooth
unending plastic, ramming and gasping, drowning in air. She didn’t have to, look,
or ask, when even now her own small amphibious heart thudded
within the curve of her ribs, this breath, then that, the only meaning
even vaguely in reach of her grasp.
-Mary Carroll-Hackett, (Un)Hinged, Kattywompus Press, 2019
Monday Must Read! The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall
A must-read for any writer or storyteller, I think.
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist
“A jaunty, insightful new book . . . [that] draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us.”
—New York Times
—New York Times
Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. Now Jonathan Gottschall offers the first unified theory of storytelling. He argues that stories help us navigate life’s complex social problems–just as flight simulators prepare pilots for difficult situations. Storytelling has evolved, like other behaviors, to ensure our survival. Drawing on the latest research in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology, Gottschall tells us what it means to be a storytelling animal and explains how stories can change the world for the better. We know we are master shapers of story. The Storytelling Animal finally reveals how stories shape us.
“This is a quite wonderful book. It grips the reader with both stories and stories about the telling of stories, then pulls it all together to explain why storytelling is a fundamental human instinct.”
–Edward O. Wilson
“Charms with anecdotes and examples . . . we have not left nor should we ever leave Neverland.”–Cleveland Plain Dealer
Daily Prompt Love <3 The Reveal
22 July 2019
revelation (n.)
Make art about a revelation, about what was revealed.
Virginia Womxn Writers! A New Reading Series Wants to Read Your Work! <3
Womxn at Red Door 104: Words & Art
A New Reading Series Celebrating Virginia Women, Woman-Identifying, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, & Nonbinary-Identifying Writers
Womxn at Red Door 104: Words and Art, created to celebrate Virginia womxn writers, is a partnership between Creative Writing at Longwood University and Red Door 104, a unique gallery and art learning center owned and operated by the tireless and talented Audrey Sullivan, in historic downtown Farmville,Virginia.
The series will consist of two events annually:
- A reading and reception in April 2020, with two featured readers and five cameo readers.
- All selected readers will then also have the unique and exciting experience of having visual art created by central Virginia artists in response to their submitted work. This art will be revealed in a second event, an art opening at Red Door 104 the following October.
The first Womxn at Red Door 104 reading will take place from 2-4 pm on Saturday, April 4, 2020. The art opening will take place in October 2020, date tba.
Selected writers must be available to read in person, and should be willing to attend both events.
Believing that artists should be compensated when possible, we will award all selected readers a small token honorarium.
Please submit writing samples, as detailed below, along with a 50-75 word bio, via Submittable. Please include in your bio your current Virginia city of residence.
Submissions are limited to current Virginia residents.
Complete Submission Details Here!
Daily Prompt Love <3 It Droppeth As a Gentle Rain
21 July 2019
For Mercy has a human heart,/Pity, a human face:/ And Love, the human form divine,/And Peace, the human dress.–William Blake
Make art about mercy, about showing mercy, about receiving mercy, about the power of mercy.
If We Could Know Our Bones <3 Throwing Back to a Older Poem
Feeling the need to share the title poem from my 2013 book, If We Could Know Our Bones–if we saw how much we’re alike, could we be kinder?
If We Could Know Our Bones
But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty.~Gospel of Thomas
If we could know our bones the way we know our skin, perhaps we’d not dig graves, but build rooms, havens, shrines, for even our enemies, their bodies rescued from the ditch and battlefield, no longer pitched into holes, safe and out of sight, but standing, eloquent and equal in their lines: tines of rib, cradle of skull, clavicle like a little key, memories of movement in femur and fluted tibia, their jaws, hinged and singing, angel light pouring through the basin of each pelvis. Free of water, fat and muscle, perhaps they’d claim us, tell us of sharing even what can’t be known–Os innominatum– those nameless bones.
-Mary Carroll-Hackett, 2013
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Call for Submissions! K’in! Seeking Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction, & Work from Young Writers
We’re reading for our November issue!
Experimental, traditional, playful, prayerful, celebratory, challenging: human—try us. Show us a new way to tell one of the millions of stories under that glorious sun.
Complete Submission Guidelines Here!
Daily Prompt Love <3 Where You Came From
20 July 2019
If you live in the United States, unless you’re Native American, your people came here from somewhere else.
Make art about your immigrant ancestors.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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