Feral: ˈferəl,ˈfirəl/
adjective
Df: (especially of an animal) in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication.
Make art about wildness, about being in a state of wildness, about escaping domestication.
Nate Pritts, author of Post Human, from A-Minor Press is this week’s recommended read. He is the author of eight books of poetry, including Revenant Tracer, which won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and will be published in the fall of 2017. Nate is the Director and Founding Editor of H_NGM_N (2001), an independent publishing house that started as a mimeograph ‘zine and which has grown to encompass an annual online journal, an occasional digital chapbook series, a continuing series of single-author books and sporadic limited edition/low-fi projects.
His most recent collection is Post Human (2016) which Publishers Weekly says “leads readers through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human relationship with technology. Weaving his poems together as a meditative critique of technology and its numbing effect on the everyday, Pritts asks readers to imagine other possibilities amid ‘this daily flood/ of ephemera, this electronic life.'”
Publishers Weekly described his fifth book, Sweet Nothing (2011), as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” POETRY Magazine called The Wonderfull Yeare (2009), “rich, vivid, intimate, & somewhat troubled” while The Rumpus called Big Bright Sun(2010) “a textual record of mistakes made and insights gleaned…[in] a voice that knows its part in self-destruction.”
Nate Pritts is Associate Professor at Ashford University where he serves as Curriculum Lead and Administrative head of the Film program.
Nate’s Website: http://www.natepritts.com/
Buy Nate’s Books!
The Wonderful Yeare (A Shepherd’s Calendar)
Read More from Nate Online
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/nate-pritts
https://superstitionreview.asu.edu/issue12/poetry/natepritts
http://www.poolpoetry.com/poetry-nate-pritts.html
http://sporkpress.com/weeklies/poetry/archives/00000016.htm
https://theawl.com/a-poem-by-nate-pritts-bba876458796#.5nrjez1cl
http://www.rattle.com/the-wonderfull-yeare-by-nate-pritts/
http://indigestmag.com/blog/?p=17863#.WDw65NUrKM8
Interviews
http://www.natepritts.com/essays-interviews/
http://bombmagazine.org/article/6536/
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010_02_015660.php
Happy reading, y’all!
xo
Mary
Better Than Black Friday Writing Marathon!
Good Morning, Bargain Shoppers! No Lines! No Waiting!
24 New Prompts for our Third Better Than Black Friday Writing Marathon! Now posted!
Join us in the Facebook group, and git that write on, y’all!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1512919158978356/
23 November 2016
Dreamt I was working with a couple of other people in some kind of disaster distribution center, coordinating and handing out goods to people in need, blankets, socks, water bottles, cloth diapers for babies. People moved through the barn-like building, their steps stuttering softly against the dirt floor. The line seemed as if it would never end. It didn’t feel like I was doing enough. But then, a young woman with two small children, a baby on her hip, and a four or five year old girl holding her hand, stopped in front of me for a blanket. The young mother’s face was drawn and exhausted, and the kids too seemed scared and weighted with whatever disaster it was we were all dealing with out there in the world.
The little girl said, “Blue.”
I smiled, not sure for a second what she meant, but then I looked down. The stacked blankets were mostly green and gray, but tucked into the pile halfway down or so, one blue blanket.
Her mama shushed her, and smiled sadly at me. but the little girl looked up at me, smiling a little around the fingers she had in her mouth, and said again, “Blue?”
Her mama hushed her again, saying, “Missy, we can’t–“
“Sure we can,” I said. I pulled the one blue blanket out of the others and offered it across the table to the little girl. She let go of her mama, and reached out with both her little girl hands to take the blue blanket, wrapping her arms around it like a hug and smiling.
We all smiled.
Make art about small acts of taking care of each other.
22 November 2016
Make art about leadership, about the qualities of leadership, about the responsibilities of a leader.
21 November 2016
Make art about facing the darkness, even, especially our own.
The beautiful Naomi Ayala was born in Puerto Rico and moved to the United States in her teens, eventually earning an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Writing in both Spanish and English, she is author of the poetry collections Wild Animals on the Moon, chosen by the New York City Public Library as a 1999 Book for the Teen Age, This Side of Early, and this week’s recommended read, Calling Home:Praise Songs and Incantations. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Boriquén to Diasporican: Puerto Rican Poetry from Aboriginal Times to the New Millennium (2007), Latino Boom: An Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature (2006), and First Flight: 24 Latino Poets (2006).
An educator and arts administrator interested in environmental causes, Ayala has received numerous awards, including the Connecticut Latinas in Leadership Award, the 2000 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy of Environmental Justice Award, and the 2001 Larry Neal Writers Award for Poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Ayala has been a visiting humanities scholar for Hermana a Hermana/Sister to Sister and was co-chair of the board of directors for the organization Change: Building Social Justice, Starting in the Classroom; she co-founded the New Haven Alliance for Arts and Cultures. A former resident of Washington, DC, she currently lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and works as a freelance writer, educational consultant, and teaching artist.
Buy Naomi’s beautiful books!
Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations
http://bilingualpress.clas.asu.edu/book/calling-home
This Side of Early
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/side-early
Wild Animals on the Moon
http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/wild-animals-moon-and-other-poems
Read More from Naomi Online
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53007
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala.html
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/nayala.html
http://washingtonart.com/beltway/ayala4.html
http://www.nathanielturner.com/naomiayalabio.htm
http://www.anomalouspress.org/current/25.ayala.winter.php
http://blogthisrock.blogspot.com/2010/11/poem-of-week-naomi-ayala.html
Interviews
http://www.eethelbertmiller.com/muse/ayala.html
http://letraslatinasblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/pablo-miguel-martinez-interviews-naomi.html
Interview for the Oral History Program at the Institute for Latino Studies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdLwaN2ez8
Hear Naomi Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isocCGT-hFQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJZKJpqAIAw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUPkGvwHjFo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5zfe-f9kc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84jhZutUlWo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABMXD7mY3uc
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
12 There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body…13 We were all baptized by one Holy Spirit. And so we are formed into one body. It didn’t matter whether we were Jews or Gentiles, slaves or free people. We were all given the same Spirit to drink. 14 So the body is not made up of just one part. It has many parts.
15 Suppose the foot says, “I am not a hand. So I don’t belong to the body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of the body. 16 And suppose the ear says, “I am not an eye. So I don’t belong to the body.” By saying this, it cannot stop being part of the body. 17 If the whole body were an eye, how could it hear? If the whole body were an ear, how could it smell? 18 God has placed each part in the body just as he wanted it to be. 19 If all the parts were the same, how could there be a body?20 As it is, there are many parts. But there is only one body.
21 The eye can’t say to the hand, “I don’t need you!” The head can’t say to the feet, “I don’t need you!” 22 In fact, it is just the opposite. The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are the ones we can’t do without. 23 The parts that we think are less important we treat with special honor.–1 Corinthians 12:12-23 New International Reader’s Version (NIRV)
Make art about Connectedness, the inescapability of how we are all connected.
11/19/2016
Dreamt a conversation with a friend last night about the ancient Roman god Janus. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, doorways, passages, and endings. He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.
Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace. The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace. As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and is associated with progression of past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, and of one universe to another.
Make art about Janus, or about gateways, doorways, transitions from past to future, from one world to another.
11/18/2016
Thinking on how it wasn’t all that long ago that it was my Irish ancestors that many people wanted out of the country, saw as less than human, thought they were taking their jobs, hated for their faith and their culture.
Make art about fear and exclusion.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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