27 March 2020
My four-leggeds are so much company and solace, even more than usual, right now.
Make art about the comfort of critters, about what animal companions bring to our lives, especially in times of stress.
18 March 2020
Nourish the body. Feed the soul.
Thinking on all the things that fed me these last few days. Yes, the meals shared with my son, but also my brother-man Eric in West Virginia, with his guitar, serenading the world with an Irish song, the silly memes my sister Adaire and I sent back and forth to each other, my young alum Katlyn and her friend selflessly working to collect donations for families and kids in need in quarantine, my current students excitedly discussing their short stories and poems in our online class, my friend Brigid writing a new comic who shared the pages with me, the sound of my friend Lynne’s laughter through the phone, my old dog sleeping on his purple pillow, my silly cat Moco biting my elbow because I was ignoring him, the humming of the bees across the burgeoning green in my yard, the multitude of good people out there doing good work teaching, sharing, cooking, donating–coping, all of them, in beautiful, humane, and community-minded ways.
So much, in the midst of this fear, to feed the soul.
Make art about one thing recently that fed your soul.
Monday Must Read! Pam Uschuk
This week meet Pam Uschuk. Political activist and wilderness advocate, Pam Uschuk has howled out six books of poems, including Crazy Love, winner of a 2010 American Book Award, and Wild In The Plaza Of Memory. A new collection of poems, Blood Flower, was released in February 2015.
Translated into more than dozen languages, Pam’s work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, etc. Uschuk has been awarded the 2011 War Poetry Prize from WINNING WRITERS, 2010 New Millenium Poetry Prize, 2010 Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International.
Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal Of The Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado. Uschuk is often a featured writer at the Prague Summer Programs, teaches occasional workshops for the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center, and was the 2011 John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She’s working on a multi-genre book called The Book of Healers Healing: An Odyssey Through Ovarian Cancer.
Buy Pam’s Beautiful Books!
Blood Flower: http://wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=193
Crazy Love: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=104
Wild in the Plaza of Memory: http://www.wingspress.com/book.cfm?book_ID=141
More of Pam’s books here!
http://www.wingspress.com/author.cfm?author_ID=24
Read More from Pam online:
http://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/poets/uschuk_pamela/
http://www.thedrunkenboat.com/uschuk.html
http://www.terrain.org/poetry/24/uschuk.htm
Hear Pam Read: https://vimeo.com/74141138
Praise for Pam’s Work!
“Like Lorca, Uschuk is a poet of the duende, that mystical Spanish conception; she views the poem as a vehicle for fierce engagement with the body and its social realities, often with a metaphysical awareness that transcends and extends the corporeal into the natural world. Working a poetics rare for a North American writer, Uschuk has crafted a poetry equally steeped in nature and political resistance. This is an ecological poetics of engagement, a mythic poetry—part Lorca, part Rachel Carson.”–Sean Thomas Dougherty, RAIN TAXI, 2012
“American Book Award–winner Uschuk’s new collection of meditative, delectably powerful poems offers a steady and generous solace that serves as a platform for thought-provoking glimpses into spirit, family, and feeling. She has written of a tethered reality, commonplace secrets, and emotional rescue. And she is political. Among the more than 40 poems, “Red Menace” (“After all of these years / it’s clear what it was / those teachers couldn’t name— / not just the consonants but the roots, / the skin drums”) and “Black Swan” (“Grandfather, what purpose can you discern / now your entitled eyes are soil, / your heart going to anthracite?”) are standouts. In the same vein as her contemporaries Patricia Smith and Joy Harjo, Uschuk is strong in metaphor, urgent in language, and powerful in vivisection.” — Mark Eleveld
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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