8/19/2015
Daily Prompt
“The brain, like the earth, lies in layers”~Patricia Kirkpatrick
Make art about layers, literal or metaphorical, or use structural imagery and build a piece of art–poem, painting, essay, story–itself in layers.
My mama kept a garden to feed us kids when I was growing up. We were poor, but nowhere near as poor as my mother had been as a child, growing up as she did back in those beautiful North Carolina mountains in the Depression era.
One of the reasons I can is to remind myself to be grateful. I think about how this was the only way my grandmother–we called her Miz Pearl–had to feed my mama and her brothers and sisters, and how she’d work all summer so they would have anything to eat at all in the winter. One hard winter the only thing they had at all were the green beans Miz Pearl had canned the summer before. So as I’m working, I’m thinking how lucky most of us are, to have access to food in ways that the generations before us did not. I’m not rich by any stretch, and I do love my home food, but I have never been hungry, not truly, because of women who put up food this way, who had that wisdom.
So i’m grateful. and really really aware of how I don’t need this food to live, how I don’t have to haul water up from the creek, how I don’t have to build a fire to cook, how hard, how so so so hard, those women before us worked to care for –just to feed–their families.
I’m even more grateful, and excited, because for the first time, my sons, my oldest J, who is 26, and his younger brother Dean–the one I call Manchild 🙂 just months away from his 21st birthday– have asked to learn how to preserve food by the old canning methods. Even Manchild’s best friend Colin wants to learn! So I’m one Happy Hippie Mama right now 🙂
The web of cultures in which I was raised teaches us to honor the wisdom of elders, to honor and appreciate the wisdom born of survival and innovation and ingenuity developed over thousands of years walked by the procession before us. It teaches us to honor what sustains us, the planet, and our community. I am excited to share this with my sons, with these young people. I am honored, and humbled, to have the chance to teach this way of Loving as it was taught to me.
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Daily Prompt
“Oh my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways. And deep ways and steep ways, and high ways, and low.”~Henry Lawson
Make art inspired by old wisdom.
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“When we respect our blood ancestors and our spiritual ancestors, we feel rooted. If we find ways to cherish and develop our spiritual heritage, we will avoid the kind of alienation that is destroying society, and we will become whole again. … Learning to touch deeply the jewels of our own tradition will allow us to understand and appreciate the values of other traditions, and this will benefit everyone.
I always encourage them to practice in a way that will help them go back to their own tradition and get re-rooted. If they succeed at at becoming reintegrated, they will be an important instrument in transforming and renewing their tradition.”― Thích Nhất Hạnh
Monday Must Read!
This week, meet Therése Halscheid. Therése’s new book Frozen Latitudes (Press 53), won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, HM for Poetry. Other collections include Uncommon Geography,Without Home, Powertalk, and a Greatest Hits chapbook award.
Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals, among them The Gettysburg Review,Tampa Review, Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge.
By way of house-sitting, she has lived the life of an itinerant writer. Her travels have taken her from a swamp in the Florida Panhandle to the Arctic north of Alaska, where she lived with and taught an Eskimo Inupiaq tribe.
Visit Therése’s website: www.ThereseHalscheid.com
Little Patuxent Review
Seeking Works that Witness Shape Shifting
Little Patuxent Review will accept submissions of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and artwork for the Winter 2016 Myth issue.
Mythology both shapes and reflects culture—forming a bridge between individual and universal experience. How do you cross the bridge from past to present—or from individual to universal? How do you travel the mythic quality of life? LPR seeks works that witness shape shifting in micro and macro ways. Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize in literature suggests: “The writer who shuts himself up in a room and goes on a journey inside will, over the years, discover literature’s eternal rule; he/she must have the artistry to tell their own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as their own…”
Submissions are open from August 1, 2015 to October 24, 2015.
Little Patuxent Review is a community-based publication focused on writers and artists from the Mid-Atlantic region, but all excellent work originating in the United States will be considered.
Although our issues are organized around themes, we allow considerable leeway in how contributors interpret them in order to ensure access to the broadest range of high-quality work.
Submissions details here: http://littlepatuxentreview.org/
So thrilled to be included in the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts from Matter Press 🙂 Thanks to the editors and rock on!
Thanks to Valley for including me at Life in 10 Minutes 🙂
http://www.lifein10minutes.com/your-10/2015/8/11/brother-bill
8/11/2015 Bonus Prompt ❤
My baby brother Bill was my best friend in this life. He would have been 46 today. I miss him every moment. Make art about best friends.
Woke up hearing someone singing this 🙂 So just had to share ❤
Daily Prompt
“We are stardust. We are golden”~Joni Mitchell
Make art about cosmic origins. Or the origin of the cosmos.
Monday Must Read!
This weeek, meet Ellen Hagan, writer, performer, and educator. Her latest collection of poetry Hemisphere was released from Northwestern University Press, Spring 2015. Ellen’s poems and essays can be found in the pages of Creative Nonfiction, Underwired Magazine, She Walks in Beauty (edited by Caroline Kennedy), Huizache, Small Batch, and Southern Sin. Her first collection of poetry, Crowned was published by Sawyer House Press in 2010.
Ellen recently joined the poetry faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan in their low-residency MFA program. She teaches Memoir, Poetry & Nature, and co-leads the Alice Hoffman Young Writer’s Retreat at Adelphi University. She is Poetry Chair of the DreamYard Project. A proud Kentucky writer, Ellen is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, Conjure Women, and is co-founder of the girlstory collective. She lives with her husband and daughters in New York City.
Website
Buy Local
Hemisphere: Poems | IndieBound
Review
BOOK: Ellen Hagan’s ‘Hemisphere’ – LEO Weekly
Duende Literary Magazine
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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