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.
25 April 2017
Seventh day of rain here. Everything is gray, saturated.
Make art about being drenched.
24 April 2017
A prompt I do with my students, an effort to reconnect them with their bodies, and to use that beautiful sensory work in their writing.
Home smells like….
Fear tastes like…..
Beauty feels like…..
Sorrow looks like….
Love sounds like….
Make art intersecting and grounding a large concept through the body, through an unexpected sense.
22 April 2017
I can’t join the March for Science today, so to honor those who march–
Make art inspired by this.
20 April 2017
“No one has ever become poor by giving.” -Anne Frank
Make art about the benefits of giving.
21 April 2017
Lots of company above this morning for our walk.
Make art about maintaining balance, about regaining balance, about seeking balance.
17 April 2017
16 April 2017
“He fought because he actually felt safer fighting than running.”
– Richard Adams
It’s hard to empathize with the combative life attitude until we look below the surface and see it’s a protective mechanism, meant to combat the anxiety produced from a world perceived as hostile. The need to fight is really just a signal of deep fear.
Make art about the fear driving combative people, or about understanding and forgiving them.
15 April 2017
At some point every semester, I challenge my students to look everyone they meet in the eye, even the strangers they pass, to turn while standing in line and speak to the person behind them, in front of them, to make acknowledging other human beings around them a habit.
One of my current students asked me, sadness softening her young face, why other people won’t, don’t, look at each other, much less look each other in the eyes as they pass. We’re afraid, I told her, of revealing ourselves, of being seen.
Make art about seeing each other, about taking the risk of being seen.
14 April 2017
Make art about service, about how the self is found in service to others.
SOME SPECIAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS LOVE!
HEARTWOOD BROADSIDE SERIES CONTEST
The brand spanking new issue of HeartWood comes out tomorrow! Thrilled to share amazing work from some amazing writers! 
And our second annual Broadside Competition is under way! Submit poetry, flash fiction, or micro memoir! Submit now! And share the call!
Partnering with West Virginia letterpress company Base Camp Printing, the winning entry (poetry or flash prose) will be featured on a limited-edition letterpress broadside with an original image inspired by the text.
Contest Judge: MAGGIE ANDERSON is the author of five books of poems most recently Dear All, (Four Way Books, 2017) and five edited or co-edited volumes of poetry. She was the founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and founder and editor of the Wick Poetry Series of the Kent State University Press. Anderson was also the Director of the Northeast Ohio MFA in creative writing from 2006-2009 and is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as grants from the Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania Councils on the Arts. Maggie Anderson is Professor Emerita in English of Kent State University and currently lives in Asheville, NC.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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