"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
Light will be a journey of emotion through photography and poetry. It will feature the work of established and emerging photographers and poets. The theme for the inaugural issue is Human. It’s a bit of a challenge. We identify humanity with countless topics. There are many ways to make the “human-ness” of our situations personal, beautiful, and memorable. But how do we take what’s so familiar and make it fresh and surprising? We’re looking for photography and poetry that investigate the theme. Give us your boldest, slyest, most inquisitive visions of the human.
“I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.”~Violette Leduc
Make art about relentless heat.
19 August 2016
So I stood in my yard today and watched a truck hauling a trailer lose control just long enough to smash my mailbox to smithereens.19 August 2016
Make art about witnessing destruction.
20 August 2016
Visiting with family and looking through some newly discovered old family photographs, including some I’d never seen of that wild lil girl I was 🙂
Make art about yourself as a child.
21 August 2016
My sons helped me shuck, cut, and can six dozen ears of corn today. It’s a messy job, but now the house smells like caramel corn, and we have yummy summer in a jar for those cold winter months.
Make art about a task that’s hard, but worth it.
22 August 2016
I’m headed out later this week for a spiritual retreat and a couple of road trip visits with family. Excited, but fretting over getting all my stuff ready.
Foliate Oak Literary Magazine wants your best writing, art, and photography. We are seeking submissions from contributors who we have not previously published. Please read our guidelines before submitting:www.foliateoak.com/submit.html.
From their guidelines:
“We love previously unpublished quirky writing that makes sense, preferably flash fiction (less than 1000 words). We are eager to read short creative nonfiction also. We rarely accept submissions that have over 2700 words. We enjoy poems that we understand, preferably not rhyming poems, unless you make the rhyme so fascinating we’ll wonder why we ever said anything about avoiding rhymes. Give us something fresh, unexpected, and will make us say, “Wow!” We’re not interested in homophobic, religious rants, or pornographic, violent stories.
I was in West Virginia this past weekend for a house concert style poetry reading in Scott Depot WV, hosted by the kind and generous Mary Imo Stike and John Stike 🙂 The mountains as always were beautiful, my hosts warm and lovely, and the audience, around twenty-two people in attendance–were spirited and funny and smart and a very eclectic talented bunch themselves, in sooo many ways! We were also blessed with the beautiful musical talents of The Wild Hares! Awesome, funny, Doug, Jim, and Mike rocked the tunes before and after the reading 🙂
The conversation after the reading was just amazing! Talk of–yes, poetry :-)–but also of physics and spirituality, language and issues of class bias, tradition and preservation, the search for truth in so many ways beyond academia. I learned–and laughed :-)–with every conversation. I felt blessed to be in their presence. And twenty more copies of my crazy books out into the world! 🙂 Thank you, Mary and John, and thank you, West Virginia, for an incredible reading experience!
I do believe these house readings, the revival of the salon, are crucial to the future of poetry. So many readers and thinkers and lovers of words outside the insulated walls of academia! I’m grateful for that, and I can’t wait to meet more of them! ❤
Many nations with atrocities in their past—Germany, Rwanda, South Africa—prominently recognize their painful history with memorials, museums, and monuments. This kind of trutful recognition, acknowledgement, helps with healing.
We have yet to do that in the United States. As Jessica Leber writes in the linked article below, “Even today, the nation is largely silent about one of its historical periods of shame: the thousands of lynchings that terrorized southern blacks right up until the Civil Rights era.”
We can do this, y’all. We can be brave enough to face our own nightmares. We have to, if we are, as a nation, going to heal and come together.
“The Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama organization led by civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, has, for the last few years, been working to place historical markers at lynching sites all around the country. At TED’s conference this week, the group showed a sneak preview of plans for a new national memorial to the victims of lynching that they hope to break ground on some time this year in Montgomery, Alabama.
“In America, we’re not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises us. It constrains us,” says Stevenson. “We have to create a new relationship with this history.”
Make art about facing, acknowledging, being accountable for, hard truths about the past.
Headed off to wild and wonderful West Virginia for a reading. Driving through these amazing Appalachian mountains always fills me with such awe.
Make art about the mysteries felt in mountains.
14 August 2016
Road Angel named Bay, a very large beautiful young man working as a cashier in a roadside stop, his smile like a bright bright beacon, caught me doing a lil dance in the aisle to the BeeGees piping in overhead. He grinned and immediately started dancing too 😀So we finished out Stayin Alive while I paid 🙂
Make art about dancing with strangers. 🙂
15 August 2016
Feeling this this morning, the music.
“Some days I catch a rhythm, almost a song/in my own breath”~Philip Levine
Make art about the music you hear, in anything, in everything.
Spent all day canning and preserving food. Always takes me back into the company of all those over time who did this before me, especially the women who taught me, as a child, to can and put up food for the winter.
Make art about food as heritage.
12 August 2016
Was abruptly awakened by a crow at the window, informing me—loudly–that the suet cages needed filling 🙂
This week meet 
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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