Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 All About Some Love and Joy–Gotta Be, In These Dark Days
14 June 2017
Make art about ways of finding (re-finding) your joy.

15 June 2017
Make art about taking a risk on Love.

14 June 2017
Make art about ways of finding (re-finding) your joy.

15 June 2017
Make art about taking a risk on Love.

10 June 2017
Accompanied my daughter and son-in-law today for that GrandPerson’s first trip to a fair.
Make art inspired by a fair, or carnival.

11 June 2017
Traveling on back roads today, my favorite way to get anywhere.
Make art about back roads, country lanes, two-lane blacktops cutting through nothing but countryside.
12 June 2017
Grading and gardening day.
Make art about pulling weeds, about weeding things out.

13 June 2017
Dreamt someone I love brought me a gift.
Make art about a fistful of stars.

Pithead Chapel
Call for Submissions: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Prose Poetry
“Pithead Chapel is a monthly online journal of fiction,
nonfiction, and prose poetry. While many magazines and journals close
during the spring and summer, we’re open year-round.”
Visit www.pitheadchapel.com for detailed submission guidelines.

9 June 2017
I’m so excited! Going to be entering into a new creative collaboration with a dear friend.
Make art about working with others, about the benefits of collaboration.

8 June 2017
to show that something exists or is true —+ to His success bears witness to the value of hard work. Rising ticket sales bear witness to the band’s popularity.
formal : to make a statement saying that one saw or knows something asked to bear witness to the facts She was asked to bear witness at the trial.
Make art about what it means to bear witness.

7 June 2017
Feeling my Southern mama at my shoulder.
Make art about manners, having them, learning them, lacking them, using them in difficult situations.

4 June 2017
Make art about locks, locking things in, locking things out, unlocking locks.

5 June 2017
Something I’m still learning, still working on.
Make art about making space for the unknown, the yet to come.

What a beautiful read this week!
Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press, 2014). She holds an MFA in Poetry and a graduate certificate in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University, and an MA in English and Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Alleyne’s fiction, non-fiction, interviews, and poetry have been widely published in journals and anthologies such as Women’s Studies Quarterly, Guernica, The Caribbean Writer, Black Arts Quarterly, The Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gathering Ground, and Growing Up Girl, among others. Her work has earned several honors and awards, most recently the Picador Guest Professorship in Literature at the University of Leipzig, Germany, a 2014 Iowa Arts Council Fellowship, and first place in the 2016 Split This Rock Poetry Contest. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, and is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She currently works at James Madison University as Assistant Director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center and an Associate Professor of English.
Buy Lauren’s Beautiful Book Here!
Praise for Difficult Fruit
Lauren Alleyne’s voice is a revelatory and formidable fusion of irrepressible music and uncompromising craft. Like snippets of cinema, these poems arrest the senses and challenge what’s known. Every door this exceptional work opens opens onto a larger light.—Patricia Smith
To go back “is a verb conjugated in dreams,” Lauren Alleyne writes in her debut volume Difficult Fruit, inscribing the governing mystery of this work, the secret knowledge of the dead. In anaphoric bursts of incantatory disclosure, in ghazals of love and survival, eros and the infinite, she does, indeed, go back, past all griefs and illuminations, “to the song beneath the song.” There is uncommon spiritual knowledge here as well as political discernment. There is much to learn while accompanying Alleyne on her “raft of language,” through a troubled world and an imagined heaven, to the place “from which comes all singing.” I have gone with her and would do so again and again.—Carolyn Forché
Difficult Fruit is a book I wish there were no need for. But need there is; and Alleyne delivers poems of loss and grief and, thankfully, hope. “Meaning is the closest we get to salvation,/which is to say the word changes nothing/–it does not unmake the rivers,” she writes. But addressing the ages in ghazal and crown and free verse forms, she reminds us, in the “flaming sentence” that in one’s life, “it is in the raft of language we begin our escape.”—Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
More From Lauren Online
http://www.laurenkalleyne.com/work.html
http://www.gwarlingo.com/2014/the-sunday-poem-lauren-k-alleynes-difficult-fruit/
https://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/689-lauren-k-alleyne-poetry
http://www.2river.org/2RView/10_4/poems/alleyne.html
http://www.thegriefdiaries.org/poetry-by-lauren-k-alleyne/
http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/24-november-2010/two-poems/
http://www.thethepoetry.com/2013/02/poem-of-the-week-lauren-k-alleyne/
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/09/poetry-madame-x-by-lauren-k-alleyne/
Hear Lauren Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8VfxSkn3dc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax3nmQXD0YQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E5PvO_Lkcs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70DVGoDzRlI
Wonderful work!
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
3 June 2017
I collect photographs from thrift stores, other people’s pictures sold, I guess, in estate sales and such. I carry some of them with me when I travel, sometimes keep some of them on my night stand, wait for them to tell me their stories, or just so I can say that someone remembers them.
I scanned in some of my favorites.
Make art inspired by one of these photos.






Malevolent Soap
Deadline: July 1, 2017
Malevolent Soap is an independent journal of poetry and fiction. We’re based in Melbourne, Australia, but our issues feature emerging and established voices from around the planet. We publish annually, in September. Anything goes, but we’re partial to work that explores intersections of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Whether it invokes Nicolas Cage as muse or bemoans Rick Deckard’s overconsumption of MSG in verse, we’re interested.
Our debut issue is slated for release on September 1. Submissions are open until July 1. We pay $20 AUD per published piece.
To submit, visit the website malevolentsoap.com

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