Category: Writing Life
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"If I’m going to expose anyone it’s going to be me," Cheryl Strayed
If you can make it through (it’s on the long side), this is a nice interview with author Cheryl Strayed about being brave in your work and how you write about the people in your life and still protect them. “One thing I will say is that you don’t know what will happen if you…
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Gum … or new friends?
I’ve been going through poems the past week.5 and have noticed that many of them are twofers i.e. what in my mind for so long was one poem, is in fact two. The ease of splitting them is actually really awesome because it means I’m in an accepting mode and am no longer mashing things…
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Like riding a bicycle
This morning I set my alarm early and actually woke up to the chiming. The morning before I slept in about an hour and a half past it without any knowledge it had even gone off. I made an unfortunate cup of bad coffee and surrounded myself with poetry books, my journal, my manuscript of…
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Who needs oven racks when you have the sidewalk?
This morning driving into work, the palm trees parted and downtown lay under a dusty heat blanket. 9 am and 100 degrees. These next few days are sure to be something I’ve never felt before. By Friday it will be 115. If I could just stop sweating, thin out the Northeastern blood I’ve built, I…
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Let the displacement begin
Im in the middle of no where. In a quiet house where the only noise is a running refrigerator and the swallows nesting on the back porch. My friends are miles behind me and I’m not going back. My love is in an odd transition zone of gearing up to say goodbye, but still having…
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Cold Turkey
Riding the advice from the beautiful poet, Melissa Green, I have decided to stop pursuing publication of individual poems in literary magazines for at least a year. Why? Because I’m fucking tired. I’m tired of focusing more on rejections than I am on my poems. I’m tired of feeling like I’m failing every day. I’m…
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Devotion, in my book
Hanging laundry on the line, the bells extended over the row houses into my square, sunlit yard. Why were they reaching out now, I wondered? To tell me it was noon? Church has never been a welcome place for me. I equated it with mild punishment. I saw the hippocracy early on – my alcoholic…
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Dues are up
I’m wondering what I should do this morning. It’s such a warm, beautiful morning that I had to pull the covers over my head to sleep in. Another night shift tonight – I ride them pretty easily, it’s steady work, but mundane and not creative. News design is the assembly line of design – headline…