On this & that, and how are you?

Jessica Hagy - Indexed

On Dinner
The pantry is empty, again, and as I'm shopping, again, I realize much of my life is spent buying family packs of pork chops. And there's just two of us. And I don't really like pork chops.

On Swimming
It's been years since I was surrounded by jumping, squealing, swimsuited children with bird-like bones and rounded bellies, and at the pool I remember how much I like water. But it’s never easy, the strokes, the breathing. So much thinking. I like to float, the water sloshes in my ears and hushes my thinking away.

On Getting Through
A man we know hung himself.

“It’s so sad,” says my husband.

“Yes,” I say. “You just never know what people are going through. But what could we do even if we had known?”

“Save him,” he says, plainly.

We're sitting outside and a full moon burns low.

“I don’t think it works that way,” I answer. “Sometimes you can’t change the pull of sadness.”

We've said so much we are afraid to say anything more so we sit together with the heaviness of truth.

On Dreams
No one wants to hear your dreams. Don’t share them and never, ever, in detail. That said, I’m having vivid dreams. It leaves me exhausted, as if I’ve spent the night working through a whole day. And my god, don't I do enough of this in my waking hours?

On God
I’m writing long letters to God. My calls went unanswered, desperation settled in, and I grabbed a pen. Maybe he thinks me cheeky, wordy, whiny. Letters are best, because even if he did call I couldn't tell which voice is his or mine, and which is the one I want to hear.

On Writing
None of it is stellar. But that’s not the point. The point is to express, and in that act to feel less sad and alone, to find and hold the small points of light.

On Letters
Maybe we’re all writing letters to God. When we garden or hike or bike or sail. When we sing or paint or write. We want to be held, heard, healed. Everything then, every wax and ramble, every accounting and regret, is a sort of holding on.

Dear God. Dear Life. Dear Friend. I am here. How are you?

 

 

Poem Central: Win this book!

"The first important thing to understand about this book,” writes Shirley McPhillips, “is that it is based on my belief that poetry is not an academic subject but an art. And therefore it belongs where life is.”

And right away, I'm hooked. I'm in. I'm taking this train all the way to the station.

Billed as a place where people and poems meet, Poem Central: Word Journeys with Readers and Writers is true to its title. Packed with tips, techniques and practical tools, this book is a focused and valuable resource for poets, teachers, and poets-in-the-making.

Author-editor Shirley McPhillips is a seasoned teacher, speaker, writer, and poet laureate for Choice Literacy. Her path to poetry is road-tested and real, and she deftly combines solid structure, thorough research, and genuine encouragement.

Divided into three parts — weaving poetry into lives and classrooms, reading poems, and writing poems — Poem Central gathers a range of voices: professional poets, inspired teachers, known and unknown writers, artists, illustrators, musicians, editors, and students, who offer examples and samples of how poetry plays a part in their lives. This down-to-earth approach gives the book an encouraging and inclusive vibe. [Disclosure: I’m one of those "unknown writers." McPhillips found my poem, Instructions, exactly and asked for permission to include it in the book.] 

This toothy and well-designed resource stands proudly with other gems in its genre — The Crafty Poet by Diane Lockward and Awakening the Heart by Georgia Heard, for example — and the book’s elaborate resources and reference sections lead to even more treasures. 

Best of all, McPhillips speaks my language:

“One of poetry’s gifts, for me, is the nourishment of an inner life — the outside brought in, rearranged, and sent back out again,” she writes. “It is a meeting place for the objects and activity of the outside world and the inner world of consciousness and imagination. Recognizing, attuning, reaching out, connecting, responding. This is the place for poetry; this is the attitude of poetry. This is how it shows us a way we might face life.”

Win this book!
To enter a drawing to win a Poem Central by Shirley McPhillips, simply add your name and contact info in the blog comments section by August 12, 2014. I'll randomly (eyes closed!) choose a name from the entries. The winner will be announced on August 13, 2014.

 

Thankful Thursday: Signs

Newport, Oregon

Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise.

It's Thankful Thursday. Please join me in a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things & more.

It's no secret that I'm in search of signs; Each day I read two horoscopes (strength in second opinions), and turn a simple phrase into pertinent message. I'm soft for mystery, meaning, serendipity.

During Summer Writing Adventure Camp last month, the youngsters and I stumbled into our "theme song," a tune sang at every street sign: Stop, look, what's that sound? Everybody look what's going down.

Thank you, Buffalo Springfield. Of course, none of the children had heard of the band, the song, or the war prompting the song.

To be true, I was first to belt it out, as an urgent plea to get the youngsters to, well, stop for traffic. But then the tune hung around as a call to pay attention to the world. Full disclosure: I was doing most of the singing, off-key, and frequently confusing "sound" for "sign."

You can imagine my delight, then, when we discovered an actual sign tucked into a wooded lot in the heart of Newport, Oregon's historic Nye Beach: 

I love you, too.  

So sweet and warm. So yes.

Like all good signs, there's a backstory. Artist Shannon Weber is "on a mission to change the world one love note at a time." Learn all about her project at http://www.loveyou2.org/

We stood staring at the sign in wonder. We took photos (it's generational, you know, to view life as a photo waiting for capture). We gawked and wondered: who? what? what more?

And then we discovered, beyond the sign, sculpture among weeds, art within bramble. This wasn't a neglected lot at all! How many times had we walked right past, never giving a second, deeper, look?

A simple sign, of just four words, changed our pace, perception, and day.

 

What are you thankful for today?

 

on a mission to change the world one love note at a time - See more at: http://www.loveyou2.org/about-me/#sthash.0x3tURUQ.dpuf
a San Francisco-based ephemeral artist on a mission to change the world one love note at a time. - See more at: http://www.loveyou2.org/about-me/#sthash.0x3tURUQ.dpuf
a San Francisco-based ephemeral artist on a mission to change the world one love note at a time. - See more at: http://www.loveyou2.org/about-me/#sthash.0x3tURUQ.dpuf

Are you Pliable or Payable?

Things are often not what they seem.

Lately, many things are not what I see.

I’m in a loop of misreadings.*

 

While reading a church service program

What I read: 
Following the service you may stay for prayer, or exist silently.

What it actually said: 
Following the service you may stay for prayer, or exit silently.


While reading a fashion & style blog

What I read:
An Object of Desire: The Perfectly Colored Blog

What it actually said:
An Object of Desire: The Perfectly Colored Bag


While paying bills

What I read: 
Accounts Pliable

What it really said:
Accounts Payable


I much prefer a pliable balance.

Do we see what we want to see? And is the tired mind a conduit for surprising, better lines of our own?

I have a friend who writes every night, in bed, before going to sleep. Even when she is tired. Especially when she is tired. That's when the good stuff happens, she says. The mind is slogged and lets loose what is normally corrected and contained.

May we all have tired but willing, pliable minds (and bank accounts).

What are you reading, or misreading? 


* With a nod to Sarah J. Sloat, a writer who often shares misreadings on her blog, The Rain in My Purse.


Thankful Thursday (all week long)

Where I Belong, by Tristan Dimick, at Summer Writing Adventure Camp

 
I spent the week at Summer Writing Adventure Camp.

At Seashore Family Literacy, on the central Oregon Coast, learning and laughing with a group of delightful young writers, ages 9 to 14. 

Combining creative writing with high-energy explorations, we hiked Cape Perpetua, crawling beneath the 500-year-old Giant Spruce tree; walked the span of the Alsea Bay Bridge, with cars rumbling beside and the bay lapping below; traveled by public bus to Newport's Nye Beach, where we toured an art gallery and invited visual art to inform our literary art; kayaked through the Alsea Bay and Lint Slough, spotting herons and hawks.

We learned restaurant manners in an artful cafe. And created dance sentences and movement machines. And, with Pablo Neruda as our guide, we asked unanswerable questions.

We listened, touched, tasted, and laughed. We read together. We grew still and quiet. We wrote under and through, around, and about — poems, stories, sillyness and seriousness — then learned how to shape, polish, revise.

Like Tristan, for five full days I knew where I belonged.

Thankful Thursday lasted all week long.


Thankful Thursday: Stacks


Even better than holding, touching, smelling, and hugging new books is taking them home and reading them in your own bed, under your own covers, with your own lamp shining beside you until someone yells for you to turn it off and get some sleep.

— The Reading Promise: My Father and the Books We Shared
by Alice Ozma


On this Thankful Thursday, let us praise the summer reading season!

Oh, the beauty of light days and long nights.

Of books and stacks and anticipation.

Oh, the sweet, sweet immersion a good book brings. 

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, books, and more. What are you thankful for today? What's in your stack?

 

Sisters: "Our home of friendship"

Peace, love & understanding: Drew and Cindra
She called me It.

As in, Why does It have to tag along?

I taunted back, called her Big Calves (then recoiled, years later, when my own body ballooned into awkward adolescence). We were five years — and a world — apart.

I was a brat, there's no polish to put on it, and she was unbelievably patient. All those growing years, she was my kind protector — doing my chores so I wouldn't get in trouble, caring for me while my parents worked.

Once, when we were just 13 and 18 years old, long before cell phones and hovering parents, we took a roadtrip from Colorado to California.

Once, she dropped everything — a new husband and a year-old baby — to rescue me when I was sick, alone, and living 1,000 miles away.

Through asthma attacks and deep depression, my sister has been at my side.

We're very different. She's a stay-at-home mother to six children; I'm childless by choice. She watches American Idol; I barely watch tv. She sings and sobs through The Sound of Music; I search for sad, dark films.

Now, separated by time zones, we've never been closer. Last month, enjoying a rare visit together, my sister and I fell into our shorthand: fast chat, laughter, and knowing nods. My teenage niece tried to make sense of us.

"So," she said, turning to me, "You write about people you know?"

"Umm," I said, "sure, sometimes."

"Have you written about Mom?"

"Umm, no."

"Why not?"

Her innocent inquiry stopped me short. My sister, my friend, my heart, I've struggled to write about you, to understand and express the deep and complicated love we share.

In a synchronicity, the next week I picked up The Knotted Bond: Oregon Poets Speak of Their Sisters. In this collection, dozens of writers — including Kim Stafford, Ann Staley, Paulann Petersen, Dorianne Laux and more —  explore the tangle of family bonds and baggage, ranging from utter joy to penetrating grief.

Liz Nakazawa, the editor who pulled the collection together, offers a lovely dedication: "To my sister . . . You are sunshine when it rains, wind in my sails, and the shared pillar of our home of friendship."

Here, in these pages thick with heartache and love, I didn't find the story of my sister and me but I did discover the work of writers who did what I cannot: put words to the beautiful twine of sister-friends.

 

On Mixed Heritage

Mari L'Esperance — writer, editor, psychotherapist

To be hybrid is

to anticipate the future,

wrote Japanese-Irish American

artist Isamu Noguchi in 1942.

Here in Los Angeles in 2014,

that future is now."


— Mari L'Esperance

 

From 3 Good Books, a series in which I ask artists and writers to share their favorite books on a given theme. Go on, head over to Push Pull Books for 3 Good Books.


Thankful Thursday: Without Words

People like to talk.

A lot.

And loudly.

I realize this on a long slog home, traveling east to west, through multiple airports and time zones.

On the first leg of the flight, toddlers squirm and scream. Parents look away, oblivious or exhausted or both. This is all now routine. In the aisle a man swaggers about a merger; he is important and this is urgent. Stink-eye stares are futile. Even an iPod can't cover this squall.

On the second flight of the never-ending journey, the man seated behind me has left his girlfriend and is moving out west. He's looking for a job, and just may land one thanks to the man across the aisle who tells his new pal about an awesome video game that involves wizards and killing, and then gives him a job lead. Video Game Man recently started a business with the woman sitting next to him, because "the construction business is, like, booming big-time."  

I don't want to know any of this; I'm not even trying to listen. I catch all this with plugged airplane ears, that's how loud the conversation.

In front of me, a woman is coughing up a lung — for a full four hours.

Once landed, the bus ride to the parking lot features a woman screeching into her phone about losing something — her wallet? her mind? — who then panics as she nearly misses her stop because she's so distracted with herself. 

Weary and worn, we finally get to our car. The engine offers a solitary start. I hear only the rhythm of tires on road. No radio. No talk. Just beautiful, beautiful silence. Cocooned in the midnight lull, I'm thankful for a world without words.

It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. Joy contracts and expands in relation to our attention and appreciation. What are you thankful for today?

 

(Un)Natural Resources

Lee Lee — artist, mother, thinker

Where science

offers authenticity,

art is rooted in our

emotional core and

has the capacity

to touch people

in a way that

encourages

action."

                                                                                — Lee Lee

 

From 3 Good Books, a series in which I ask artists and writers to share their favorite books on a given theme. Go on, head over to Push Pull Books to learn about 3 Good Books.


 

Sweet Grief at Benton County Museum

We're hitting the road! Sweet Grief, a painting & poetry collaboration by Senitila McKinley and myself, is heading to the Benton County Museum in Philomath, Oregon.

Will you join us for the party?

Sweet Grief: Paintings & Poems on Love and Loss
Benton County Museum, May 23 - July 5, 2014
Opening Reception on Friday, May 23, from 5 to 7pm

We're happy to share the exhibition with Permission 2 Play, a support-through-quilting group for cancer patients. The quilters, both novice and experienced, share their passion for textile arts, try out new and interesting techniques, and give themselves "permission to play."

Sweet Grief debuted in April 2012 at the Windermere Triad Gallery in Seal Rock, Oregon, where it enjoyed an eight month-long run. In 2013, Sweet Grief was on display at the Visual Arts Center in Newport, Oregon, and in Summer 2014 the show exhibit at the historical Benton County Museum.

To learn more about Sweet Grief and the special-edition exhibition book, visit Push Pull Books.

Thankful Thursday: Lost & Found

Getting Lost, a write-over poem by Drew Myron.

Well, isn't this a nice surprise? My poem about getting lost is getting found.

Getting Lost, a write-over poem I created during National Poetry Month, was recently published in the Eugene Register Guard newspaper.

Many thanks to Brian Juenemann, of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, for using his monthly column to shine light on Oregon's literary landscape.

And because everything comes from what came before, a nod to that tattered Rudyard Kipling tome that I write over and upon, and to Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost, whose words circle my head.


It's Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

Dear Young Writer,

When I say Write me a letter, I'm asking to see you.

To meet at a place on the page in which we hover above our lives, seeing with clarity who we are and the capacity we carry.

I want to see you. Not How are you, I am fine, but the real version of yourself. Let's have a conversation, slowed and real, in which we talk to each other by talking to ourselves.

How are you? 

It's the first question and the last. It's the start to finding the buried treasure, the buried you, beneath the barrier and disguise, the hurts and worries, all the secrets and shame.

How am I?

All of us are small and uncertain, clouded and confused. You know this, don't you? Each of us struggles and hurts and hides. You feel more than the smooth surface of life, and still you cannot yet grasp how deeply we are each of us knitted together in our aloneness.

My dear, young friend, I am writing you a letter. In every line, I'm looking for you.

With love,

Drew

 

On Tour: What's your writing process?

The blog bus rolled into town and stopped at my front door.  

My Writing Process Blog Tour is a four-question quiz that gives writers the chance to blab about themselves, and readers the chance to meet writers (and peek into some not-so-private writing lives).

Please hop aboard and indulge me as I ask & answer:

1.
What are you working on?

The world is full of words and I'm trying to live — and write — within these tenets:

Is it kind? Is it helpful? Does it add to the silence? 

This is tricky. Answering honestly leaves little room for banter and blather, and a lot of room for crickets. Fortunately, I like the quiet. But, oh, you meant, what are you working on, as in writing? Ummm, the same recipe applies.

2.
How does your work differ from others in its genre?

Every writer carries their own history and approach. In this sense, every writer is unique. And yet, nothing is new. Every story and poem, every painting and product, wears the beauty and scar of everything that came before. Nothing is new, so everything is new.

On a more practical level, I'm a reporter-publicist-poet, which makes for a writer who is deadline-driven, story-focused and tender-hearted. And I favor searchers and seekers, the broken and lost — people with art and grit.

3.
Why do you write?

I write to make sense of the clamor. I crave clarity, the stretch of finding my way from head to heart to hand. The act of writing is compulsion and companion, and almost always sweet relief.

4.
What is your writing process?

Resist, retreat, react, scratch, stir, sift, sort, give up, give thanks, breathe, repeat.


Blog Tour Backstory:  The writing world is so vast, yet so small, and sometimes we're all in this soup together.

I was kindly invited to go "on tour" by poet Jessica Goodfellow, author of The Insomniac's Weather Report, a poetry collection enjoying a recent re-issue. Jessica shares poetic insights and ideas on her blog, Axis of Abraxas.

Now, the tour bus rolls merrily along with stops at the writers I've invited. Go forward. Do not stop, swerve or slow. Drive ahead to meet:

•  Amber Keyser, writer of fiction and nonfiction for tweens, teens and adults

•  Sarah Sloat, sly and wry editor and poet.

 

Thanks for playing!

Poems are written, names are drawn, and National Poetry Month comes to a full, exhausted close. Thanks for playing with me, and thanks for reading, writing & appreciating poetry.

Winners of the 2014 Big Poetry Giveaway are Linda H. and Brian Wong.

And, yes, we're all winners when we express ourselves. Write on!

 

Thankful Thursday: Poem in Your Pocket

Oh, what delight! The convergence of my favorite days: Thankful Thursday and Poem in Your Pocket Day.

Created by the Academy of American Poets as part of National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day encourages you to carry a poem and share it with others.

Call me a sap but I enjoy a designated opportunity to share poetry. On this Thankful Thursday, I sing the praises of poems carried, clutched, and shared.

Here's an old favorite. Over the years, each time I read the poem I appreciate it in a deeper way. I like this about poetry: the words do not change but the experience I bring to a poem changes. Sometimes we grow into, and with, a poem.

Sweetness

       for my mother


Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear

   one more friend

waking with a tumor, one more maniac

 

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness

   has come

and changed nothing in the world

 

except the way I stumbled through it,

   for a while lost

in the ignorance of loving

 

someone or something, the world shrunk

   to mouth-size,

hand-size, and never seeming small.

 

I acknowledge there is no sweetness

   that doesn't leave a stain,

no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet . . .

 

Tonight a friend called to say his lover

   was killed in a car

he was driving. His voice was low

 

and guttural, he repeated what he needed

   to repeat, and I repeated

the one or two words we have for such grief

 

until we were speaking only in tones.

   Often a sweetness comes

as if on loan, stays just long enough

 

to make sense of what it means to be alive,

   then returns to its dark

source. As for me, I don't care

 

where it's been, or what bitter road

   it's traveled

to come so far, to taste so good.

 

— Stephen Dunn

 

Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise. Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to give thanks for people, places, and things in our lives. What are you thankful for today?