mimsy and outgrabe

Brevity magazine publishes, besides "concise, literary nonfiction," a number of brief essays on the craft of writing. I liked what Terry Tempest Williams had to say in "On Writing as an Act of Living." I'll probably share this interview with my ENG 101 students, who have to complete a service learning project during the semester. Also, bits of it resonate with the part of me that's still determined to write the "Poetry of Witness" essay, like this: Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. To tell a story is to create an action in the mind of the listener or reader. It is the same with bearing witness — be it watching a community of prairie dogs or witnessing the miles and miles of swirling oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. To bear witness is not a passive act, but an act of conscience and consequence that has the power to alter our collective consciousness. As writers, we are often changed by the story we...

The first snow of 2013 set me back a bit in the blog world, mostly because it set me back also in the writing-poems world. A. worked 16 hour days through the storm, and because I waited up for him to travel 40 miles back from the yard each night, I didn't stick to my morning writing schedule. It might be the pregnancy hormones overriding my innate impulse to stick-to-a-schedule-no-matter-what -- or I could just be worn out from carrying around all this extra weight -- but whatever the reason, I've been tired, tired, tired lately, and taking advantage of any chance to sleep. Yesterday, however,  I brushed up those three monologues from November, and shipped them off to A.P., who I'll meet with (eventually) and see what he thinks. Progress on this verse play creature is being made, even if it's in tiny, tiny increments. I managed to grade about 1/2 of the material I brought home with me this weekend. I consider this quite an accomplishment considering I was h...

Bernadette Geyer kindly tagged me to participate in this "Next Big Thing" meme that's been floating around the blogs of novelists and poets and short story writers for the past two months (I think it's been two months). While I suppose there's some argument (in my head, only) to write about my poetry manuscript as my "Next Big Thing," I think I'll answer the questions as they relate to my verse play project -- partly as a way of getting my head back into the project, and as a way to kind of organize my thoughts as I gear up to (once again) birth this beast. (To be clear: the verse play, not Vampire Baby. It's too early for Vampire Baby yet. I think. I hope!) **** What is your working title of your book (or story)?   The astoundingly creative and apt "Verse Play." For a while I tossed around the idea of "Thunder, Lightning, Rain." It comes from Mac b eth , specifically the first li...