8 August 2017
Make art about heat rising, literal or metaphorical.
9 August 2017
Make art about the smell of soil.
10 August 2017
Make art about what you see in an animal’s eyes.
11 August 2017
It’s my brother Bill’s birthday. He would have been 48.
Make art about brotherly love, about real acts of brotherly love.
12 August 2017
Make art leaning in, about what it means to you to lean in.
13 August 2017
Make art struggling to remember a dream.
14 August 2017
Make art about putting things away.
15 August 2017
Make art about struggling to stand.
16 August 2017
Make art about the sound of children singing.
17 August 2017
Make art about what you see in the sky.
18 August 2017
Make art about reaching for something.
19 August 2017
Make art about standing with strangers.
20 August 2017
Make art about a braggart who needs to be the center of attention.
21 August 2017
Make art inspired by the old meanings of the word eclipse: an abandonment, a failing, a forsaking.
22 August 2017
Make art about a moment you were blind.
23 August 2017
Make art about placing that call you’ve dreaded making.
24 August 2017
Make art about bullets.
25 August 2017
Make art about an instance in which you countered hate with Love.
26 August 2017
Make art about the first signs of autumn coming.
27 August 2017
Make art about the art of the apology.
28 August 2017
Make art about cooking together.
29 August 2017
Make art about learning to cry.
30 August 2017
Make art about a secret you carry.
31 August 2017
Make art about what’s being whispered.
1 September 2017
Make art inspired by a gray silk sky.
6 June 2017
Make art about what the moon says.
7 June 2017
Make art about what you see in the water.
Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and an amazingly loving and generous person. She is the author of Riding on Comets, and most recently, she published a cookbook with a sense of humor, One Foot in the Gravy–Hooked on the Sauce. Cat is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans.
Buy Cat’s Books!
Praise for Riding on Comets
“The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.”-Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte
This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”–Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.
Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”–Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon
One Foot in the Gravy–Hooked on the Sauce
More from Cat Online
http://www.friedchickenandcoffee.com/2016/04/27/reckoning-fiction-by-cat-pleska/
https://www.catpleska.com/interviews-reviews-blogs/
http://www.rednecromancer.typepad.com/mouth_of_the_holler/
https://pocahontastimes.com/memories-to-memoirs/
http://www.lauratreacybentley.com/apps/blog/entries/show/41683985-spotlight-cat-pleska
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
4 August 2017
“The only true borders lie between day and night, between life and death, between hope and loss.” ― Erin Hunter
Make art about borders, about living at the borders, about crossing borders, about the illusion of borders.
1 August 2017
(ĕl′ĭ-gəns)
n.
Refinement, grace, and beauty in movement, appearance, or manners.
Tasteful opulence in form, decoration, or presentation.
Restraint and grace of style.
Make art about the elegance of the natural world.
30 July 2017
Was asked by another young person to teach him about cooking and food preservation. Blows up my heart to pass the old wisdom on ❤
Make art about preserving and teaching old wisdom.
31 July 2017
Woke up hearing music this morning, a tenor singing down the hall, song woven through the fabric of my waking air
Make art about who you hear singing in the distance.
A former English teacher, Helen Losse was born in Joplin, MO and educated at Missouri Southern State University (BSE, 1969), where she majored in secondary education and English and Wake Forest University (MALS, 2000), where she studied African American history and religion and creative writing. Her master’s thesis, Making All things New: The Redemptive Value of Unmerited Suffering In the Life and Works of Martin Luther King Jr., is available in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University. She wrote four entries in the Encyclopedia of North Carolina.
She is the author of four books of poetry, Evey Tender Reed, Facing a Lonely West, Seriously Dangerous, and Better With Friends, as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have been anthologized in Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VII: North Carolina, and Kakalak 2014, nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and three times for a Best of the Net award, one of which was a finalist. She was featured by Kathryn Stripling Byer, Poet Laureate of NC, on the North Carolina Arts Council web site along with two other Winston-Salem poets. Helen’s poem “Four Snapshots of the Sea-Going Boats,” won 1st place in the 2009 Davidson County Writers’ Guild Adult Writing Contest. The former Poetry Editor for The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, she is now an Associate Poetry Editor for Kentucky Review.
Helen lives with her husband Bill in Winston-Salem, NC, where she occasionally writes book reviews for various literary magazines. She is a rail fan, a NASCAR fan, a Tony Stewart fan, a Kyle Busch fan, a Ryan Newman fan, a Kurt Busch, a Carl Edwards fan, a fan of the flip, a Dallas Cowboys fan, a Wake Forest Demon Deacons fan, and a fan of the Carolina Tar Heels. Helen is a Roman Catholic who loves Christmas. She and her husband have two grown sons.
Buy Helen’s Beautiful Books!
“If books of poetry were considered fitting contributions, Helen Losse’s Every Tender Reed, would be among the most heartfelt gifts in a church offering plate. With a keen eye for craft, Losse takes readers on a personal pilgrimage—pondering everything from the beauty of God’s creations to what it might feel like to “be consumed” in pursuit of spiritual purity. Written with fierce tenderness and the courage it takes to write poems both honest and true, this fine collection is a must read. “—Terri Kirby Erickson, author of A Lake of Light and Clouds
“Helen Losse’s Every Tender Reed resonates with a tone of loving memory and forgiveness—a promise for the good life, the verses raising blinds on the dark to brighten songs born to all the world’s beauty. Grace becomes a natural outgrowth of Imagination’s repose. Red clover soft-lights the people; all of us are the ever-present tender reeds.”—Shelby Stephenson, North Carolina Poet Laureate
“Losse’s Every Tender Reed is penance in poetry—honoring the reader as much as the Creator. This volume, for the most part, is a serene journey with the author as she walks the Path toward the enlightenment of self-knowledge.”—Patricia Gomes, Poet Laureate, City of New Bedford, MA
More From Helen Online
https://helenl.wordpress.com/interviews/
https://poetsgulfcoast.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/three-poems-by-helen-losse/
http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=1606
http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=381
http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-others-may-know-what-we-knew-by.html
Hear Helen Read and Talk About Her Work
https://helenl.wordpress.com/recorded-in-time/
Women’s Voices for Change
https://womensvoicesforchange.org/poetry-friday-helen-losse-video.htm
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
Better late than never 🙂 Since I missed yesterday….
Anomaly (formerly known as Drunken Boat) is accepting submissions in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, and translation from June 1 – September 1. Send your best, most challenging work through Submittable today! anmly.org/submit
SPECIAL CALL: Anomaly’s GLITTERBRAIN folio seeks work by queer and trans indigenous people and people of color who identify as mentally-ill, neurodivergent, or as having mental illness. Send up to 5 pieces, and a brief bio to sarahATanomalouspressDOTorg by August 15th.
28 July 2017
Make art about someone who speaks without thinking.
29 July 2017
Make art about chasing your own tail.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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