Stacked

Happiness is a fresh stack of books. I can't wait to dig into these:

Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight — new poetry by Julia B. Levine, a psychologist working with abused children. Her previous book, Ditch Tender, is one of my favorites

Be Thrifty: How to Live Better with Less — because I'm a minimalist who loves discounts and deals (note: I bought a used copy)

Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey — a novel/letter/love story

Deep Water by Patricia Highsmith — this is my first venture into this revered writer's psychological thrillers

Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth — second book in the Call the Midwife series (which the PBS show is based upon)

Euphoria, by Lily King — her newest novel (I liked her last book, Father of the Rain)

Delicious!, by Ruth Reichl — though she's written numerous books, this is the restaurant critic's first work of fiction (Tender at the Bone was a fantastic memoir of her childhood)

 

What's on your shelf? What are you eager to read?

 

Thankful Thursday: Drive-Thru


Dear Driver of the Car In Front of Me at Starbucks:

When we pulled up for our coffees, the barista said, "Your drinks have been paid for by the car ahead of you."

You were driving away, anonymous and generous. I like your style.

We were stunned and giddy.

"This happens pretty often," she said. "You'd be surprised."

The world, and people, can be so darn nice.

Thanks for reminding me.

xo

Drew


Gratitude. Praise. Appreciation. Please join me for Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

One line at a time


But for all poets, it’s not their

books that I go back to, that I consider

important, but it’s a few, or maybe many,

poems. I read one poem at a time and

almost one line at a time. The line is the

most important element of a poem,

of poetry, to me.


- Rick Campbell

 

Please join me at Push Pull Books, where I host 3 Good Books
and ask writers to share their favorite books and influences.

 

Thankful Thursday: Why I Write Letters

1.
It's the gentle gesture that draws me, the curve of letters, the slope of a signature, the cross-out in mid-thought. I like letters, the way they slow time to invite reflection for both writer and reader. Letters are tender reminders that feeling is first, just as e.e cummings says.

2.
To celebrate National Handwriting Day on January 23, a friend who owns a wine shop is giving a free glass of wine to anyone who writes her a letter, postcard or note.

3.
Writer and reader share a special language through letters. In each envelope, we seal a message that says, I look for you in these pages, and see my own reflection too.

4.
"In a letter," writes Anne Carson in The Beauty of the Husband, "both reader and writer discover an ideal image of themselves, short blinding passages are all it takes."

5.
Some of my most satisfying writing is rooted in letters. In these of-the-moment conversations, nothing is planned, prepared or overthought.

6.
"The world is full of paper," says Agha Shahid Ali, "Write to me."

 

Gratitude. Praise. Appreciation. Please join me in Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things, and more. What are you thankful for today?

 

Why I bristle when you say you're blessed

New Year's Eve

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor's party to her parents' farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at a body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with you character,
Don't blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.

— Carl Dennis

This poem appeared in The New Yorker
and was reprinted in The Best Spiritual Writing 2013.

 

Great Books of 2014

I like these long lazy days after Christmas and before New Year. It's a quiet lull in which I am suspended in books. Page after page, chapter after chapter, it's read, read, read, and repeat. 

As the year comes to a close, I'm looking back at some of my favorites:

6 Great Books I Read This Year 

Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
An insightful novel that deftly wraps love, race, satire, and heart into one strong, sweeping story.

 

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
by Karen Joy Fowler
This odd novel shines with a narrator that turns a screwball premise into a captivating story of full-hearted love.

 

Madness, Rack & Honey
by Mary Ruefle
This collection of lectures from writer/poet/artist Mary Ruefle reads more like flashes and insights from your most creative, smart, wise and eccentric friend/professor/aunt.

 


This is the Story of a Happy Marriage
by Ann Patchett
Long before she wrote the best-selling novel Bel Canto, Patchett wrote for the New York Times, Vogue, Outside, and other magazines. In this collection of articles and essays, she shows unexpected heart, wit, pace and style.

 
Make Lemonade
by Virginia Euwer Wolff
It's rare to find a book for young teens that's rooted in the grit of reality. Written in free verse, this slim but powerful novel offers an unusually credible view of poverty, struggle and hope.


The Madwoman in the Volvo
by Sandra Tsing Loh
A witty, funny and immensely entertaining gaze into the muck of middle age.

  

How was your reading year? What's on your list?

 

More Good Books:

Favorite Books 2013 

Great Novels 2012 

Great Poetry Books 

Poetry That Shaped Me


Good Books: Inner Lives

“I am the daughter, granddaughter, and sister of psychiatrists so I have always been drawn to the inner stories of people," says artist and avid reader Sharon Bond Brown.

Over at Push Pull Books, I ask writers and artists to share their favorite books on a given topic.

Why? Because when we read, creativity stirs, and when we create, our lives expand.

Go here to discover Sharon's favorite books on women's ordinary lives.

What books would you add to the list?

 

Be a winner!


Need a break from all that shopping? It's time to give yourself a gift.

Enter the drawing to win The Existentialist Cookbook, a smart, sharp, tender collection of poems by Shawnte Orion.

The poems are strong, and the writer is real. Here's what I mean: 

I don’t want poetry to be confined or limited to the niche demographic of People Who Like   Poetry.  I’m no professor. I didn’t come out of a University writing program. I’m a “regular” person with a normal job, so I believe poetry can be relevant and appreciated in anyone’s world.

— Shawnte Orion

Go here to read the interview and enter the drawing.
Don't delay. Deadline is Saturday, December 20, 2014.

If you win, I'll mail the book anywhere in the world, at no charge, and for this special occasion I'll include a handwritten, homemade, all-natural, good-natured, personalized, holiday letter written just for you.

A free book and old-fashioned, personalized mail — now that's a merry Christmas.

* Note: I'm giving this book as a gift to my
favorite people who think they don't like poetry.
They'll read these poems and discover they really do!


Thankful Thursday: Shift

Shelly Modes - Start with the Heart

Sometimes it doesn't take much.

You drive a new route. You read a new book. You wake early, or sleep late.

Sometimes it takes more to shift your perspective — a vacation, an illness, something that jars and alarms, something that disrupts the flow.

My head has been deep in a list of plans and tasks, gifts to buy, people to see, places to go. This week I am thankful for the small shift out of myself.

The other day I was Santa's helper, greeting children and taking photos at a community center bustling with holiday cheer. Piles of cookies and candies lined the room, while a choir sang off-key but earnest as families chatted and children squealed. In this delightful chaos, children lined up dozens deep to meet Santa Claus.

These were not tots with trendy clothes and savvy parents, but children with bare necessities and struggling households. With reverence the youngsters walked toward the big bearded man. Child after child quietly whispered their wants. Legos, dolls, Easy Bake ovens. The desires were not fancy or large. There were no lists, no demands, just tender awe and adoration.

In the background a rise of voices joined together in Silent Night, and my own voice quaked with realization. My to-do list felt distant, my own desires petty. In the immediate clamor of need and love and trust, all this was Christmas.

Sometimes it takes so wonderfully little to change our world, to shift our perspective.

 

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?

 

Let me see who you are

Who are you?

The literary you. The writer you. The poet you. The professional you?

It's a hyphen-/slash world in which most of us juggle multiple roles. Like a closet full of clothes (though nothing to wear), I've created a menagerie of personal statements to explain who I am. Marketing me/reporter me/editor/poet/teacher/reader . . .

It's difficult to write about yourself without appearing a braggart or a dullard. I've got many versions that do the job but never really shine (see also: pencil skirt hanging in the back of my closet). I tug at the words, worrying that they're too stiff, too long, too little, too much.

I don't like cutesy bios, in which a writer gets too familiar or too clever. Don't tell me your favorite foods or your cat's name, and don't share the bloated tale of how you've been writing since age two. I'm old school: keep it third person and professional.

Why this concern with the self? If you're sending your work into the world, you need a bio. We want to know the person behind the words. Who doesn't turn to the back of the book to learn about the author? And anytime your writing goes public — from novels, to poems, to blogs, to reading events and teaching gigs — you'll need a bio, and preferably short and engaging.

Here's my latest favorite bio, from Christopher McCurry as it appears in the back pages of Rattle. It breaks the literary norm in that it's not a tiresome litany of his publishing history. Instead it gives a quick but meaningful peek at who he is: 

I write poems because a high school English teacher in Bourbon County, Kentucky, believed I could, and now I want my students to believe that they can write them too. Actually, I want everyone to believe that."


In those two sentences, we learn so much: the writer lived in the South, and he is now a teacher with heart. Knowing this about him, I am eager to read more of his work.

Short, succinct, humble — that's my kind of bio, and my kind of writer.

 

Who are you? How do you shine in 50 words or less?

 

 

Fast Five with Shawnte Orion


I never noticed the difference

between naked and exposed

until your sweater was puddled on my floor

and your shoulders remained covered

in kaleidoscopic swirls of ink. A tattooed

cartography of memories and myths.

Sleeves I could never remove.

- Shawnte Orion, Sleeveless


Because a few questions can lead to great insight, I'm happy to present Fast Five — interviews with my favorite writers, and chances to win great books. (To enter the drawing, simply post your name and contact info in the comments section below).

Shawnte Orion takes poetry to the streets, bars, laundromats and more. His work has been published in numerous literary journals, including Crab Creek Review, Barrelhouse and New York Quarterly. He lives in Surprise, Arizona, and has been named one of 100 Phoenix Creatives.

In his debut poetry collection, The Existentialist Cookbook, Orion sifts through the absurdity of modern life for scraps of philosophy, religion, and mathematics to blend into recipes for elegies and celebrations.

You often perform your work in non-traditional settings: bars, hair salons, museums, laundromats, and street corners. Why?

I don’t want poetry to be confined or limited to the niche demographic of People Who Like Poetry. I’m no professor. I didn’t come out of a University writing program. I’m a “regular” person with a normal job, so I believe poetry can be relevant and appreciated in anyone’s world. I love occasions when I get to read to people who aren’t usually exposed to poetry. Whether they left the house for the sole purpose of doing their laundry or seeing a punk band, I like the challenge and reward of trying to hold their attention and maybe even win them over.
 
The Existentialist Cookbook, your first full-length book, offers a great blend of sharp and smart poems mixed with wonderfully tender and touching pieces. Was this range intentional?

Yes. I experience the world through an array of emotions and moods and I want my poetry to reflect that spectrum. Times when I am withdrawn and pensive are as integral to my process as moments of hilarity. This might have worked against me with certain presses who prefer a more unified “voice” but fortunately Raymond Hammond and NYQBooks appreciated my amalgamated poetics. I don’t necessarily want this collection to contradict itself, but it should contain multitudes.
 
Your poems are quick-witted, full of clever word play and pop culture references, and peppered with such engaging titles as, "Love in the Time of Hand-Sanitizer" and "Unable to Surface for Air During Shark Week." Who (or what) has influenced your writing?

Before I started getting into poetry, the songwriters and filmmakers I was obsessed with in my youth left an imprint on the way I approach poems (Soundgarden and Frank Black music- Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman films, for example). Back in middle school, I also paid a lot of attention to what stand up comics could accomplish on a stage with nothing but words and perspective. It wasn’t until I took a workshop with Denise Duhamel that I began to realize how much crossover there was between the poet and stand up comic worlds. She pointed out that Denis Leary started out as a poet (even published in Ploughshares). I looked up one of the comedians I remember most (John Wing) and found that he published a few poetry books. Influences are a small world after all.
 
Your book bio says you “attended community college for one day” but that your poems have appeared in many respected literary journals. How did you come to poetry, and how did you “learn” to write?

My French teacher in 7th, 8th and 12th grade, Elaine Phelps, had our class work with poetry to understand the language. Translating and discussing the poems of Jacques Prevert showed me how efficiently ideas and experiences could be conveyed through a handful of lines. Once I started reading lots of contemporary poetry, it wasn’t always the brilliant stuff that taught me the most. Often times, it was noticing where and how certain poems fell apart that “taught“ me what I wanted to avoid.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve received?

Continually revisit the poems you thought were finished weeks, months, even years ago. A little bit of distance can create a lot of clarity.
 
Bonus Question: I’m a word collector and keep a running list of favorite words. What are your favorite words?
 
I also try to keep lists, so here are a few of my most recent additions:

reticulated

innuendo

thigmotropic

Win this book!
Enter a drawing to win The Existential Cookbook by Shawnte Orion. Simply add your name and contact info in the comments section by December 20, 2014. I'll randomly (eyes closed!) choose a name from the entries, and the winner will be contacted via email.

 

 

Thankful Thursday: Good Television?

It's raining here, and snowing there, and freezing somewhere else, maybe where you live.

On this Thankful Thursday, the weather has turned wintry and I'm snuggling up to the television. It's been years since I've watched traditional tv — sitcoms and cop dramas — and now even my cable favorites have devolved into immature skit humor (I'm talking to you, Jon Stewart).

While I read a great deal, the mind sometimes needs a break from the page, and so on this Thankful Thursday I'm grateful for smart, sharp writers who create quality viewing:

David Simon and Eric Overmyer, the writers behind The Wire and Treme, have changed my perception of what television can do. And they prove that good writing illuminates, informs and entertains.

The Wire is a crime drama series set in Baltimore, Maryland. The show centers around the city's inner-workings: the illegal drug trade, the seaport system, city government, the school system, and the print news media. Forget formulaic scripts and tired tropes; The Wire is an unusually deep and intense exploration of urban life.

 

Treme refers to a neighborhood in New Orleans, and this show begins three months after Hurricane Katrina as residents try to rebuild their lives, their homes, and their unique culture after one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history. The cast is sharp, the characters complex, the music lively, and the stories unfold with skillfull nuance. With each episode I'm left a bit haunted, wondering, "Why weren't these stories told? How did we look away?"

Both shows originally aired on HBO and are now available on DVD and Amazon Prime.

 

Call the Midwife is a BBC drama series about a group of nurse midwives working in the East End slums of London in the 1950s. Based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, the show follows young midwives who live and work alongside medically-trained nuns. Each episode reveals the gritty post-war conditions of poverty, mixed with hope in new beginnings.

The series airs on PBS and is available on Netflix.

 

Stories We Tell, is a movie, not a television series. This personal documentary explores family stories while showing "the truth depends on who's telling it." Writer and director Sarah Polley has been called both filmmaker and detective as she interviews family and friends to get to the truth of her mother and herself. The film is poignant and provides fresh insight into story writing and telling.

"When you're in the middle of a story, it isn't a story at all but rather a confusion," says the filmmaker's father, "a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It's only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you're telling it to yourself or someone else."

Stories We Tell is available on DVD and Netflix. (See also Sarah Polley's previous film, Away from Her, a tender film about a couple navigating Alzheimer's.)

 

What are you watching? And what are you thankful for today?

 

On Sunday: From the wreckage


I wonder if now when we think of “sweat and tears” in poetry what we mean by that is diligent crafting.

But there is another form of this – the experience that went into the poem in the first place, the sweat and tears of everyday living. And the sweat and tears of that which you need not search for, life experience, which seems to find you, wreck and ruin you, and then expect you to get up in the morning.

And so many people are simply at the mercy of the way the world makes them feel, they don’t need deaths or love affairs to feel a little wrecked.

— Katie Peterson
from an interview at How a Poem Happens


Please write in this book

Forget the scorn and scolding. These are the new rules: You have permission to write in books. Pick up an old book and make it new.

I love altered books — the idea of expansion, of taking one form and enlarging the canvas.

• One of my favorite works is from Karen Hatzigeorgiou, an artist creating contemporary art in the form of altered books and collage. Her work, The Art of Happiness, was created from a 1935 book of the same title. The result is a journal of striking color, collage and poetry.

The Art of Happiness by Karen Hatzigeorgiou“The Art of Happiness is sometimes a book of sadness, disillusionment, and discontent,” she  explains. “Still, it's important to note that it is also a book with an underlying current of optimism. And in that way, it has become much more of an altered book journal than I ever intended.”

• Mary Ruefle creates spare and elegant erasure books that feel beautifully distilled.

Melody: The Story of a Child by Mary Ruefle
"I use white-out, buff-out, blue-out, paper, ink pencil, gouache, carbon, and marker," she says. "I have resisted formal poetry my whole life, but at last found a form I can’t resist. It is like writing with my eyes instead of my hands."

• Valerie Savarie is an artist reinterpreting old books with skill and precision. She uses tattered tomes as canvas and turns each into a three-dimensional piece by cutting, sewing and painting. The result is a striking layered collage that leaves most of the book intact.

With Age Comes Greater Reach by Valerie Savarie
“I am adding another chapter in the lineage of storytelling," says Savarie. In the past, "stories were communicated verbally and passed on from person to person, with each storyteller adding their own twist. This is my way of passing on that tradition — creating a visual from the written and then allowing the viewer to create their own story from the images and words that they see."

 

Do you write in books? What altered books have caught your eye, stirred your mind?

 

Thankful Thursday: Nagging mothers

Gratitude. Appreciation. Praise.

Please join me in Thankful Thursday, a weekly pause to express appreciation for people, places, things and more. Joy contracts and expands in relation to our gratitude. What are you thankful for today?

I've barely had coffee this morning when my mother is on the phone asking, "What's your Thankful Thursday?"

"I'm not feeling it," I say.

She blusters and I fluster and we move on to more pressing topics, such as the weather.

But she's right.

Even in the dark days, the short days, the too-hard, nothing-is-happening days, there is always something, some small thing, some big thing, some thing for which to be thankful.

And so, chin up, step up, look up.

On this Thankful Thursday, I don't like yard signs, billboards, obnoxious ads, and much of what our political system has wrought, but and yet, I am extremely grateful — giddy, even — to vote.

From city council seats to state measures to national elections, I am thankful for the right, for the privilege, to put my opinion and voice into action.

I vote, and I'm so very thankful.

 

Month I clung

Drew Myron photo

Winter arrived last weekend, already. Soaking rain and thrashing wind. By Monday the air hung still, having exhausted itself through the long night, and the night before.

This is the hangover, the weather inside me.

Last week, a neighbor died. Three suicides, three men, in less than a year. Not close friends but people with whom I waved, and talked, and said how-do. Maybe it was love or work or vague despair. Maybe they heard the low rumble of this winter ocean, the way it can echo every no.


In October

     “Month I became the thorn.”
                 —  Sandy Longhorn

Month I clung
to sun, to bird song,
to long shadows.

Month of first chill, fire
and furnace clatter.

Month of chanterelles
and decay, understory
and apples. Of early nights,
early dinner, deep sleep.
Month of soup, squash.

Month I begged
for more time, begrudged
socks, searched
mothy sweaters.

Month I reached  
for bread and blades,
cursed the metallic sky,
my small heart, slow limbs,
my inability to rise.

Of false frights and deep fears.
Of grip and wish. Month of
the first long prayers.

- Drew Myron
Kestrel, Fall 2014