Each ending carries with it a beginning. This is the cycle lived every day of our lives; the slowing to rest, to sleep, at the end of day. That pause is the moment just before possibility presents itself as new. Tonight, we turn from the past to step into a new year, a new decade. …
Category Archives: Living the creative life
“After All the Lust” Published in Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine just published one of my poems. It’s titled “After All the Lust.” Here is the URL: https://www.pifmagazine.com/2019/03/after-all-the-lust/
Me? As Inspiration?
I enrolled in Goddard College’s low residency program for an MFA in Creative Writing that began in July 2017. At my fourth and final residency in February 2018, I celebrated my seventieth birthday. On July 15, 2018 I graduated with a Masters in Creative Writing. The past two years have been challenging and joyful as …
My Wish for You in the Coming Year
A Quote from Octavia E. Butler as we head into 2018
Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be led by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to …
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I’m Offering a Writing Workshop in Port Townsend
Time/Dates: Tuesdays from 3 – 5:00pm beginning September 12 – October 24, 2017. The final session on October 24, 2017 will run three hours (2 – 5:00pm) in order to accommodate a reading by participants. Location: Writers’ Workshoppe & Imprint Books 820 Water Street, Port Townsend, WA. www.writersworkshoppe.com 1-360-379-2617 You can register for this class after …
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My Annotation on The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Missing Voice of Tyranny in the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible is a novel that uses five different voices to tell the story of Nathan Price and his family who go to the Belgian Congo in 1959 as itinerate Baptist missionaries. The only adult narrator is Orleanna Price, Nathan’s wife. …
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I Have Work Coming Out in The Pitkin Review
My poems Gulls Drop Like Rags, Hummingbird, and Mt. Ellinor as well of a photo I took in Nisos Thira will be published in the next issue of The Pitkin Review this summer. I’ll provide a link as soon as the journal is available.
Assimilation Themes in Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory demonstrates how immigrants bring their home culture ethos with them when arriving in a new country and how that makes assimilation difficult. The novel gives us a view of the better life that many immigrants hope America will deliver. This narrative achieves its purpose using gender issues, race issues, …
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Deadline Day on a San Francisco Fellowship
Today is the deadline!Fellowship applications are now open through September 30. To apply, click here.The Grotto FellowshipOur fellowship program is dedicated to fostering emerging writers. It is open to writers of every genre, including fiction, nonfiction memoir, journalism, poetry, dramatic writing, etc. Writers who have demonstrated a commitment to their craft but who are not …
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One of My Annotations from the First Packet in My MFA Program with Aimee Liu at Goddard College
Admiration, Envy and Resentment in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Short Story, “Fatherland” Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us entry into complex family dynamics when he opens the short story “Fatherland” with the statement, “It was a most peculiar thing to do. Everyone said so who heard the story, of how Phuong’s father had named his second set …
Welcome to My Updated Website
Welcome to the new simplified website. As books, poems and/or articles are published you’ll hear about it on this page. Meanwhile I’m really enjoying working toward my MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. My advisor this semester is Aimee Liu. Her ability to get to the heart of whatever I’m working on and help …
Fall Tomatoes and Mushrooms
Today has been a day of harvesting. After bringing in the tomatoes we went mushrooming in the Olympic Mountains and came back with a bonanza of Lobster and Chanterelle mushrooms.
My Edits Are Painfully Slow So I Took a Poetry Break
Below are two poems I’ve been working on whenever I get sick of editing 350 pages of text. Poet I live on an inland sea where daily I hear the wheeze and hack of herons, long dactylic hexameters, odd wracking convulsions, sad tuneless songs to lost sailors. Like Odysseus – a low down drunk Cyrenian …
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Now My Space Really Is Complete! It Has a Cushy Chair, a Dog & Her Bed, a Character Gallery & Most Important of All – a Plotting Wall!
Here are a couple photos of the plotting wall in progress. All the visuals for composites of each major character are up where I can stare at them for inspiration. They’ll help keep my descriptions consistent, too. In addition, I’ve got a 7-foot strip of butcher paper tacked to the wall with a line that …