17 May 2017
I hate grocery shopping. But today while grudging my way through it, I ran into a retired colleague whom I adore and haven’t seen in a while. He made me laugh, like always. And I laughed through the rest of the shopping.
Make art about something good arising from something you usually dread.
18 May 2017
Dreamt I was lighting candles, thousands and thousands of candles, as far as I could see.
Make art about the power small lights.
The Broke Bohemian Summer Edition 2017
Deadline: June 14, 2017
The Broke Bohemian is now accepting submissions for the Summer 2017 Edition! We publish pieces at the forefront of unconventional thought and outlandish perspectives. Get wild. Wear your activism proudly. Bare your teeth. Rise up, and rave in the name of Beauty. We commit ourselves to fostering the voices of all people, especially those who’ve been disenfranchised and unheard among the ever-booming holler of the bourgeoisie! Come join the Bohemians!
Guidelines: https://www.brokebohemian.com/submit/
16 May 2017
No one’s perfect.
Make art about progress versus perfection, about the myth of perfection, about the lessons and the beauty of being flawed.
8 May 2017
End of the semester, so I’ve been drowning in final grading.
Make art about feeling overwhelmed.
9 May 2017
Had some morning company 🙂
Make art about chickens in the road.
10 May 2017
So much rain here lately. Making the local weathermen happy, with their maps and pointers. 🙂
Make art about a weather map.
11 May 2017
My son’s sweetie got a new kitten, Baloo 🙂 Between him and my GrandPerson, our lives are filled with glorious baby things.
Make art about small beauties.
12 May 2017
Hung my sheets out to dry. Love climbing into them after they’ve come in that same day from the line.
Make art about the smell of the sun.
13 May 2017
Today was my daddy’s birthday. He could find the funny in everything, and he loved my mama more than breath. He wrote us letters to tell us kids all the things he loved about our mama.
Make art about how much you love someone.
14 May 2017
Another Mother’s Day, and I can’t help but think of all the women who mother in ways other than the traditionally expected.
Make art about nontraditional nurturing.
15 May 2017
Reading Whitman before bed last night. For Whitman, not only was poetry a kind of democratic action, but democratic action should itself be understood as a kind of poetry.
Make art about democratic action as poetry.
Ann Tweedy‘s first full length book, The Body’s Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016, and it is currently a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann’s poetry has been published in Rattle, Clackamas Literary Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Wisconsin Review, and many other places. She is also the author of two chapbooks—White Out (Green Fuse Press 2013) and Beleaguered Oases (tcCreative Press 2010)—and she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. In addition to writing poetry, she has served as a law professor, most recently at the former Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, and is a leading scholar on both tribal civil jurisdiction and bisexuality and the law. She currently serves as in-house counsel for the Muckleshoot Tribe in Washington State. Ann grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts and graduated from Bryn Mawr College and the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. She is an M.F.A. candidate at Hamline University.
Buy Ann’s lovely book!
Praise for The Body’s Alphabet
“This collection of poems adheres to the bodies of mothers and daughters, lovers and partners, childhood and children. It reminds us how close and distant we can be, at all times, to each other, to nature, to living, and to death.”
–Trish Hopkinson, Literary Mama
“Ann Tweedy’s collection The Body’s Alphabet is a book of in-betweens – in-between homes, in-between loves, in-between sexualities. It is a book about motherhood and memory, and the space we keep for our childhood long after we have grown up around it. Though Tweedy begins The Body’s Alphabet with the lines ‘I tread through / the world mindful that upsets / follow unguarded movement’ (1), over the course of the collection she finds strength in those quiet and delicate moments, and in doing so steps out from her own carefully crafted betweenness to affirm her presence in the work.”
–Rebecca Valley, Drizzle Review
“Home is the structure you build when nowhere else will have you,” writes Ann Tweedy in this gutsy, no-nonsense collection of poems built on a precarious and often tender journey through homes no longer available to return to. The result is neither sadness nor nostalgia; it is hard, clean narrative of self-preservation and survival, fitted with unexpected joy. I feel such kinship with these poems, their testament to the strength and determination of women and men who struggle to build life anew, and to find home and happiness in a world of travail. What a blessed space this book is: a home for the wayward soul.
—D. A. Powell, American Poet
Ann Tweedy’s first book is a brave and honest examination of liminality. In delicate lyrics she confesses to trespass, asking readers to question the boundaries between acts and identity, sexuality and family. The Body’s Alphabet documents the poet’s courage, living openly as a bisexual feminist. Although childhood logic taught her that “home is the structure / you build when nowhere else will have you,” these beautiful poems knit and nest safe haven for a life spent gathering freedom.
—Carol Guess, author of Doll Studies: Forensics
More From Ann Online!
http://queenmobs.com/2016/02/interview-ann-tweedy-by-mary-kasimor/
http://untitledcountry.blogspot.com/2011/02/issue-4-featured-poet-ann-tweedy.html
http://www.lavrev.net/2010/06/ann-tweedy.html
http://www.rattle.com/nature-essay-ann-tweedy/
http://www.literarymama.com/reviews/archives/2016/12/a-review-of-the-bodys-alphabet.html
Hear Ann Read!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ6Woib8eSc
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
5 May 2017
Make art about what’s carried on the wind.
6 May 2017
Make art about being in the presence of Grace.
7 May 2017
Make art about hypocrisy.
1 May 2017
Read a story this morning about lunchrooms shaming poor children.
I cried for an hour. The scars of shame run so deep, follow us into adulthood, undermine the beauty and power of who we are at every turn, if it’s not healed.
“I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.”― Judy Collins
Make art about childhood shame, about seeing that hurt child in your adult eyes, about healing shame.
Jon Tribble‘s first collection of poems, Natural State, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2016. His second collection of poems, And There Is Many a Good Thing, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poems have appeared in print journals and anthologies, including Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Quarterly West, and The Jazz Poetry Anthology, and online at The Account, Prime Number, and storySouth. He teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where, aside from being an excellent person and amazing literary citizen, he is the managing editor of Crab Orchard Review and the series editor of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry published by SIU Press.
Praise for Natural State
One of the poems in Jon Tribble’s Natural State observes that “the finest / moment of our lives may not matter at all.” That’s a devastating truth, but Tribble’s poems about growing up in Arkansas make every moment he renders matter, and matter deeply. Natural State may be Tribble’s first collection, but it’s as polished, mature, and wise as most poets’ fourth or fifth, and it not only matters, its publication is one of contemporary poetry’s finest moments. – David Jauss, author of You Are Not Here and Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories
More from Jon Online
Video
Interview & Reading! Literary Power Couple: Jon Tribble & Allison Joseph
and, in gratitude for all of the years of service Jon has given to our community–
Happy reading!
xo
Mary
30 April 2017
I asked for a dream before going to sleep last night, a dream that would help me to solve a problem, answer a question I had. In the ways in which I was raised, dreams were just one of multiple ways of learning, ways of knowing.
Unlike mainstream Western culture, which tends to limit ‘knowing’ to what is categorized as ‘rational,’ indigenous cultures across the globe recognize multiple sources of knowledge an individual or community possess and can access, including traditional wisdom, dreaming, land knowing, symbols and images, shared knowledge through connectivity, and story, among others.
Make art about ways of knowing.
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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