"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

Posts tagged ‘We are One’

Gratitude! Almost There! Retreat with The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers

Update! 

We’re now less than $200 away from making this dream of attending the retreat with The International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in August. I can’t even find the words to express how grateful I am to all of you, for giving, for sharing, for reading.

Meet the Grandmothers here in this video, and you’ll understand why attending this retreat would be truly the dream of a lifetime.

“Ours is an alliance of Prayer, Education, and Healing, for our Mother Earth,and her inhabitants, for all of the children, and for the seven generations to come….TIme is short…Time is calling us.”

Celebrating the wisdom of women, in hope and prayer that it will save us all ❤

Please visit my GoFundMe campaign here: 

Thank you in advance for reading, and sharing! 

Surrounding you all in Light and Love and Prayer and Joy ❤ and Gratitude, always Gratitude ❤

 

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, Gratitude, Love, One Love

Tagged with:

A Little Different Call for Submissions: The Artist Unleashed, and It Pays!

Write About Your Personal Experience as a Writer or Artist.

Submissions accepted year-round.

Earn $0.015 per word to be published on our blog, The Artist Unleashed. We want articles based on your personal experience as a writer or artist to help fellow creatives. Articles for this website must be about an aspect of writing and/or art and must also inspire and/or motivate, encourage discussion, offer advice or argue an opinion, and be rich with informative/engaging content. We will tweet and Facebook your post to get it as much exposure as possible. Views on a single post have reached 1500+ within 24 hours.

Please visit our website for submission guidelines: www.theartistunleashed.com.

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Dreams, Editing, fiction, freedom, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Solstice Prompt <3 Memories of Lovers and the Body as Grace

20 June 2016

Here’s a solstice poem I wrote a few years ago, memory of a solstice back when I was a girl of eighteen, enchanted with a beautiful boy 🙂

This poem appears in my book If We Could Know Our Bones, from A-Minor Press ❤

____________________________________________________________

Remembering the Body as Grace

We all live in a house on fire. Tennessee Williams

1

I dream back the hot slow sky your body was above me, goldleafed and dappled in early sun, in those running heated days of baggy shorts, thin shoulder straps, loosed barefoot in the woods, where the world wore the soft warm pelts we tumbled in, skins multicolored scarfs we slid out of, slid into, each other. We were hungering home.

2

I wore some long breezy skirt, thinking Stevie Nicks would approve; in those days music made our maps, At a party to honor the March stars, I sat in your lap on Alan’s floor, after too much tequila, naming fish, aquarium after aquarium lining old apartment walls. Outside, a vernal moon split the day in two perfect halves, calling the first point of my Aries into startling alignment with your laugh.

3

Thirty-one suns have crossed the celestial equator since then, science and memory rearranging, the Earth’s elliptical orbit, bending, changing, precession, axis tugged in another direction. Spring even now is being reduced by one minute per year, singing as it goes. Naked to the native acre, bone-clear, the body knows what it knows.

4

Age has freed us from any need to hide, that sweet surrender of knowing celestial objects near the celestial equator are visible worldwide.

5

Assuming the body as love, my body remembers—you sleepy-eyed and unshaven, hair long, lit by light breaking into that space, where we tangled like sweet-sweating animals. What we didn’t know then, spring sliding home into summer, we do now, having worn these faces, lived in these skins, long enough to comprehend gravity as grace.

_________________________________________________

Make art about a solstice memory, about the body as grace.
lovers_silhouette-wallpaper-1280x800

Category:

2016 Prompts, animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, Dreams, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Fathers

19 June 2016

“I buried my father/in the sky./Since then, the birds/clean and comb him every morning”~Li-Young Lee

Make art about fathers.

zzzzfatherandson2

 

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Monday Must Read! Carter Sickels: The Evening Hour

 

carterThis week meet Carter Sickels, author of the novel The Evening Hour (Bloomsbury), a Finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award and the Lambda Literary Debut Fiction Award. He is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, a project grant from Oregon’s RACC, and an NEA Fellowship to the Hambidge Center for the Arts. He’s been awarded fellowships or scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the MacDowell Colony. He is the editor of the anthology Untangling the Knot: Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships, and Identity. Carter has taught in Low-Residency MFA programs at Eastern Oregon University, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and Eastern Kentucky. 

Carter’s website

Learn More About Carter in this Long Bio! Especially love Carter talking about the role of books in his life!

Buy Carter’s stunningly beautiful book The Evening Hour

https://www.amazon.com/Evening-Hour-Novel-Carter-Sickels/dp/160819597X

The Evening Hour On the Way to Film!

http://deadline.com/2016/03/the-evening-hour-movie-cynthia-nixon-brian-geraghty-carter-sickels-novel-1201720860/

Praise for The Evening Hour!

“But no book has captured what Appalachia is like right now better than Carter Sickels’ moving and beautifully wrought novel, The Evening Hour. So up to the minute that it feels as if the novel is being written as you are reading it, the novel takes a long, hard look at the dark, wonderful heart of Appalachia and reveals it in all of its complex beauty, ugliness, joy, and sorrow. . . This is one of the best American novels of the year, and it is a major contribution to Appalachian literature.”-Silas House, Appalachian Heritage

“Absorbing… Nearly every character is an underdog, and readers can’t help but root for them, even knowing all the while that it is futile….Sickels manages to depict the region and its inhabitants vividly, but without condescension… As a backdrop to Cole’s story, Sickels weaves in subtle commentary on the political hot-button issue of mountaintop removal. .  . At a time when it’s easy for outsiders who are living comfortably to speak in terms of optimism and hope, “The Evening Hour’’ doesn’t shy away from the harsh truth that, for some, there simply isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel.”-The Boston Globe

Buy Untangling the Knot:Queer Voices on Marriage, Relationships & Identity

https://www.amazon.com/Untangling-Knot-Marriage-Relationships-Identity/dp/1932010750

Read More From Carter Online:

http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/06/16/carter-sickels-honesty-compassion-and-grace/

https://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/wildlife/

http://appalachianheritage.net/2014/05/01/johnson-city/

https://www.buzzfeed.com/cartersickels/early-in-my-transition-two-teenagers-helped-me-embrace-my-id?utm_term=.hn56bEn4#.cuRWPND4

http://outcity.com/carter-sickels/

http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2012/11/09/saving-trans-author-carter-sickels

http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2012/03/my-first-time-carter-sickels.html

Hear Carter Read!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3driom6OZKk

Happy Reading!

xo

Mary

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Creativity, fiction, Gratitude, Love, Must Read Monday, Must Read Writers, One Love, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 Yogananda on Opportunity

18 June 2016

“Opportunities in life come by creation, not by chance. You yourself, either now or in the past (including the past of former lives), have created all opportunities that arise in your path. Since you have earned them, use them to the best advantage.” ― Paramahansa Yogananda

Make art about opportunity, about creating your own opportunity. 

yogananda

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

#WeAreOne

Can we start a movement? 

dialogue

 

Category:

animals, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, freedom, Gratitude, Love, Nature, One Love, Writing

Tagged with:

The Birds of Grief

This week I keep going back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, about grief, about sheer physicality of grief and loss. About feeling helpless. About how loss, no matter what, belongs to all of us. 

________________________________________

 

I Want to Bring the Birds

inside, hold them in my hands, tuck them inside my shirt, claws and all, feel the sharp tic of each frightened beak, surround them with my fingers, cradle them against the cage of my ribs, whisper shh shh shh—until they each find and linger in their place: the titmice tatting nests into my hair, crested sparrows and juncos perched and singing from my feet, the jays who see me as so much meat, supplier of suet and otherwise foolish and useless, each take a shoulder, their alarm squawk sudden and hard as a couple of crows stand sentry on my back. The chickadees, those flying golf balls with their punk rock eyes and ebony mohawks, bossy and brazen, take my ears, letting me know just how they see this whole thing going, while the shy nuthatch hides, its cinnamon shadow disappearing under my shirt as it hops up my ribs and nuzzles in like a newborn near my heart. A pair of doves, and then another, their wings ash gray and spotted with apricot, nestle in on the soft give of my belly; I touch them with just the tips of my fingers, hoping, praying, they’ll teach me the tender songs only possible in the dark. One by one, they all settle in, on my limbs, my skin, feathering, resting, and maybe, so will I, settle for real, for the first time in years, as I hear and feel their heartbeats steady, slow, ease finally, into a companion rhythm with my own. Or mine to theirs? In my dreams, it doesn’t matter. In my dreams,we are the same.

___________________________________________________________

This poem is included in my collection The Night I Heard Everything from FutureCycle Press. 

birds of grief

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Books, Editing, Gratitude, Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Friday Call for Submissions Love: Brand New Mag: Collateral

Collateral Literary Journal—New Military Themed Magazine
Submissions accepted year-round.

Collateral is a new online literary journal affiliated with the University of Washington, Tacoma. We showcase high quality creative writing and art that explores the impact of the military and military service on the lives of people beyond the active service person. These voices sometimes go unheard, and this journal captures the “collateral” impact of military service, whether it is from the perspective of the partner or child; parent or sibling; friend or co-worker; veteran, refugee, or protester. Our editorial vision is to be as inclusive as possible and ideologically diverse. We encourage submissions from professional and emerging writers.

From their About page: 

 

MISSION STATEMENT:
Collateral explores the perspectives of those whose lives are touched indirectly by the realities of military service. Numerous journals already showcase war literature, but we provide a creative platform that highlights the experiences of those who exist in the space around military personnel and the combat experience. We feel these voices sometimes go unheard, and this journal captures the “collateral” impact of military service, whether it is from the perspective of the partner or child; the parent or sibling; the friend or co-worker; or the elderly veteran, the refugee, or the protester. In any issue, you might find the haiku of a seven-year old girl whose father is in Afghanistan alongside the short story of an award-winning fiction writer. Or the first-person essay of a military spouse alongside the critical essay of an academic.

Our editorial vision is to be as inclusive as possible and ideologically diverse. We encourage submissions from professional and emerging writers alike. Regardless of authorship, we are committed to publishing high-quality fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and art that speaks authentically about the collateral impact of military service.

Collateral Website

Submission Guidelines

Category:

Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Call for Submissions, Creativity, Editing, Family, fiction, freedom, Friday Call for Submissions, Gratitude, litmags, Love, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, publishing, Writing

Tagged with:

Daily Prompt <3 What You Would Have Said

17 June 2016

“They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying.”~Neil Gaiman

Make art about what you wish you had said before they died. 

talking to the dying

 

 

Category:

2016 Prompts, Art, Artists, Bless the Day, Creativity, Dreams, Family, fiction, Gratitude, Love, Nature, nonfiction, One Love, poetry, Writing, Writing Coaching & Workshops, Writing Prompts

Tagged with:

Tag Cloud