This is happening online next week! All free! 🙂 Workshops in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Readings in the evenings! I’m teaching a generative workshop on Hermit Crab Lyric Essays on Wednesday morning, July 1, and I’m giving a reading on Friday July 3 at 7 pm. It’s all free and organized through the Oak Bluffs Public Library on Martha’s Vineyard. Tune in and join us!
My hands are shaking as I type this. The American Poetry Review has just accepted my poem “We Couldn’t Be More Biological.” American Poetry Review. I’m still shaking.
Oh my goodness! My lyric essay “What You’re Thinking Now Is a Chunk of Marble” has just been accepted at Southeast Review! It’s the second in my series of lyric essays inspired by the 4 fundamental forces of physics–this one being the gravity essay. Now I need to get on the stick and finish the remaining 2 on the strong and weak nuclear reactions… Thank you Dyan Neary and the rest of the CNF staff!
What a joy to hold my contributor copy of Sou’wester, which contains my poems “Until the World Cracks in Half,” “Last Bites Mostly Your Own Saliva,” and “Say that Again.” Thank you Poetry Editor Joshua Kryah and the rest of the Sou’wester crew!
Thank you Ross Gay! Thank you Lee Upton! Thank you Diane Seuss! Thank you Dean Young! When poets — some I’ve never even met — whose work I’ve loved so much take time out to write a blurb for my second book, out of the generosity of their hearts… Wow. That’s something I’m so dang thankful for in these uncertain, anxiety-swamped days. Thank you Ross Gay! Thank you Lee Upton! Thank you Diane Seuss! Thank you Dean Young! Thank you!
The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, where I’ve taught seven of the last ten years, has begun sharing writing exercises as part of their new online content. The Institute won’t be happening in person this summer, for obvious reasons, but anyone can now enjoy free weekly writing prompts from the faculty. Today they’ve posted an exercise I created.
It’s a prompt to guide you in writing a lyric essay, specifically one of the fragmented/collage type lyric essays which I love so much. Happy writing!
To get the writing exercise, click HERE!
My partner Sarah’s awesome short story “Shepherds Take Warning” has just been published online today in the new issue of Waccamaw: A Journal of Contemporary Literature! It’s one of my very favorite stories she’s written. It’s got skywriting, tornadoes, circuses, impending danger, laundry irons, tent revivals, and more! Congratulations darlin’!
Read the story HERE.
It was awesome to be asked to read my creative nonfiction for yesterday’s episode of The Campbell Conversations on WRVO, celebrating the work of writers associated with The Downtown Writers Center in Syracuse. Sitting at home in a bedroom closet last week — with my phone balanced on my knee — I read the first 6 minutes of my lyric essay, “Go Away and Stay Right Here,” originally published in the Colorado Review. My reading leads off the episode which also features luminous performances by Jessica Cuello, Georgia Popoff, and Arthur Flowers.
Give a listen HERE!
I’m thrilled to hold my contributor copy of Smartish Pace, which contains my poems, “The Sky Always Blue Above the Clouds Useless To Us,” “Please Let There Be an Ice Storm This Afternoon” and “Our Breaths Are Weather.” It’s an honor to share these pages with so many poets whose work I adore. Thank you so much to Stephen Reichert and the rest of the Smartish Pace crew! Dorianne Laux has a poem in it that begins “Under the blown out stars/ sounds the lone horn” and ends “smother my wet face/ with underwater kisses/ I miss you so much// I could drown” I mean, come on!
What a delight to learn just now that my poem “The New Avenues the Only Avenues We Have” has been accepted at Witness Magazine. They published a poem of mine back in 2015, and it’s such a thrill to have been accepted there again! Thank you Poetry Editor Lindsay Olson and the rest of the Witness crew!