Yes, I’ve been up to my kitty ears with kittens and cats this week. Eight of them. Yesterday, the two smart little hamsters kittens went home with their fully vacationed parents. The two senior cats will be living with us indefinitely. More on those two later. For now, I am exhauserbated.
Callie and Zona, bonded foreverThese girls loved the app “Mouse for Cats” on my ipad.
The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.
There are poems about Arizona, California, and the lakes of Michigan. My maternal grandparents are the characters that most inhabit this book.
The poems of Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged are embedded in land and weather. “Bluegills snap up larvae in slivers of illusory light,” she writes early in the collection, hinting at the sensibilities of the companionable speaker who will usher us through the book.
—Diane Seuss (2022, Pulitzer for poetry)
Cover art: Leonard Cowgill
If you pre-order . . .
How the book gets distributed is contingent on pre-order sales! SO for the pre-order period, I am donating $5 in the name of each person who pre-orders the book to Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation center. Two months into the pandemic, we had a red-tailed hawk in our yard. She was unable to fly, and a volunteer from Liberty Wildlife came out to rescue her. I wrote a poem about the incident, which was published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and is in Rooted and Winged. The gardener and I have brought many smaller injured and orphaned birds to Liberty Wildlife over the years. Some of the poems in the book are about the wildlife in our area.
If you place an order for the book, please let me know with your name and email address. That way I can keep track of the pre-orders to make sure my list matches that of the publisher. When the pre-order period is over, I will give the list of names and emails to Liberty. You will then receive an acknowledgement by email of your donation for the birds and bunnies.
As always, I am available for blog interviews and guest posts and would particularly love to set things up for fall when the book is in our hands!
Last week Liz Gauffreau posted a story from her childhood with an image of herself in Girl Scout uniform. Wow, did that ever send me back in time! If you’re familiar with the Girl Scouts, you know that the first level is Brownies. My mother bought me a cute little brown uniform, lightly worn. I remember swinging in the swings at school, pumping my legs as hard as I could, looking down at my mocha brown skirt. My friend and I were singing, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
Skip forward to fourth grade at a new school. I remember walking down the hall from the art room to the Girl Scouts meeting room. I was carrying money to give to our leader, Mrs. Norton. When I handed it over, she counted it and then accused me of stealing some pennies. I will admit that when I was a teenager I engaged in some shoplifting and paid the price. But as a nine-year-old? I wouldn’t even have thought of it. I was scared of authority, too.
What I learned from the experience is that even if you’re not guilty, once you are publicly accused you have been publicly shamed. Nothing was worse to me as a kid than shame. The look Mrs. Norton laid on me was pure hatred and disgust. She kicked me out of the troop, and I never went back. But I lived with that feeling of shame (and the stomach aches it helped cause) for years afterward.
Did anything positive come from the experience? I think it made me more sensitive to other children and then to other people in general. I never liked to see anyone bullied and would try to support people I saw bullied. This has continued throughout my life and has even included “mom groups” on social media where I defended the picked-upon. So I guess it was worth it, but it wasn’t the only problem I had at that new school. Luckily, I was only there for 1 1/2 years before we moved elsewhere.
About my new book, Rooted and Winged: it went into pre-orders last Monday. Why would you want to pre-order it instead of waiting until the release in September? In part, to be nice to me hah. The thing is, the number of pre-orders the book gets determines the royalty percentage that I will receive, as well as where the book will get marketed. So I can’t stress enough how much I would appreciate you pre-ordering instead of waiting (if you are able to, of course). AND, if you pre-order, you will be helping the wildlife in the Phoenix area as I am making a $5 donation for each pre-order! Info that I posted last week is copied below. If you want a donation slip, please let me know you pre-ordered and what your email address is.
The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.
There are poems about Arizona, California, and the lakes of Michigan. My maternal grandparents are the characters that most inhabit this book.
Cover art: Leonard Cowgill
If you pre-order . . .
I would love it if you could pre-order the book, if you can swing it. For the pre-order period, I am donating $5 in the name of each person who pre-orders the book to Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation center. Two months into the pandemic, we had a red-tailed hawk in our yard. She was unable to fly, and a volunteer from Liberty Wildlife came out to rescue her. I wrote a poem about the incident, which was published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and is in Rooted and Winged. The gardener and I have brought many smaller injured and orphaned birds to Liberty Wildlife over the years. Some of the poems in the book are about the wildlife in our area.
If you place an order for the book, please let me know with your name and email address. That way I can keep track of the pre-orders to make sure my list matches that of the publisher. When the pre-order period is over, I will give the list of names and emails to Liberty. You will then receive an acknowledgement by email of your donation for the birds and bunnies.
As always, I am available for blog interviews and guest posts.
The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.
There are poems about Arizona, California, and the lakes of Michigan. My maternal grandparents are the characters that most inhabit this book.
Cover art: Leonard Cowgill
If you pre-order . . .
I would love it if you could pre-order the book, if you can swing it. For the pre-order period, I am donating $5 in the name of each person who pre-orders the book to Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rehabilitation center. Two months into the pandemic, we had a red-tailed hawk in our yard. She was unable to fly, and a volunteer from Liberty Wildlife came out to rescue her. I wrote a poem about the incident, which was published in The Orchards Poetry Journal and is in Rooted and Winged. The gardener and I have brought many smaller injured and orphaned birds to Liberty Wildlife over the years. Some of the poems in the book are about the wildlife in our area.
If you place an order for the book, please let me know with your name and email address. That way I can keep track of the pre-orders to make sure my list matches that of the publisher. When the pre-order period is over, I will give the list of names and emails to Liberty. You will then receive an acknowledgement by email of your donation for the birds and bunnies.
As always, I am available for blog interviews and guest posts and would particularly love to set things up for fall when the book is in our hands!
You may or may not recall my book Doll God and chapbook Kin Types. Now it’s time to see the miniature versions.
After the release of Doll God, the doll on the cover was named Mary Gold by blog readers. I lost track of her for awhile, but then she turned up. I’ve been keeping her safe. Then I bought her a tiny Doll God.
Joy Neal Kidney wrote a splendiferous review of Doll God today over on her blog! You can read it here: DOLL GOD REVIEW BY JOY NEAL KIDNEY
Of course, after seeing Mary Gold’s photo shoot, my other dolls started crying for their own tiny book. This doll, with her roots from the same heritage as so many of my ancestors, was selected to pose with a mini Kin Types.
When the gardener sees me doing photo shoots of dolls and kitties (like for Tiger’s birthday), I know he thinks I’m a weirdo. But he’s the bigger weirdo because he keeps sweeping up the same dead leaves and dried flowers day after day. How boring is that!
***
Reminder to register for the blogger poets zoom poetry reading scheduled for Saturday, 23 April! Link below.
The theme for National Poetry Month 2022 is There’s A Poem in This Place. Two places to find contemporary poetry at its most vibrant are in the blogging community and at live readings. On 23 April 2022 from 4-5:30 PM ET, the two places cometogetherwhen a select group of poets from the blogosphere present a live reading of their poetry at Poets in the Blogosphere. Most poetry is meant to be read aloud, and hearing poets read their own work is a heightened experience.The event is moderated by Elizabeth Gauffreau. Please register in advance at https://tinyurl.com/Poets-in-the-Blogosphere
#NationalPoetryMonth
#blogpoetsread2022
Celebrate National Poetry Month with Elizabeth Gauffreau, Luanne Castle, Serena Agusto-Cox, Ken Gierke, George Franklin, Stephanie L. Harper, Carla McGill, Robert Okaji, and Merril Smith!
If you are disturbed by vulgarities and crass language, feel free to skip this post, but please come back next week because I don’t make a habit of subjecting people to it.
I have a nonfiction short story out in a new anthology published by Devil’s Party Press. The theme of this collection is a bad word in the title of each story. Lest you think this is sophomoric hijinks, the writers are all over forty!
Click through the photo if you want to order a copy. My story is called “The Self-Mindf**k.” See, I can’t bring myself to spell it out in public! As for the title of the anthology, you can read the book cover above.
Seriously, though, my story is childhood memoir, about the way the fear and anxiety of living in my parents’ home over a basement bomber shelter affected my thinking—hence, the self-mindf**k. Here is a little “teaser.”
In the summer I turned six, my father dismantled his cozy basement workshop and built a secret underground bomb shelter out of cement blocks. This intrusion into our home was my first encounter with the Cold War. Television regularly put us through tests of emergency broadcasting via CONELRAD, and at school, duck-and-cover drills were weekly rituals. The goblins in our nightmares were “Commies, Reds, and Pinkos.” The anxiety this threat gave me was palpable and made even more acute because I was supervised by nervous parents. I had to wear a cumbersome lifejacket just to play in the sand at the beach. Overprotective was an adjective created for my mother and father. I don’t know if I would have been a fearful child if I had grown up in a different environment. Maybe part of it was genetic. But a fraidy cat I was–too scared to attempt cartwheels or to ride atop someone’s handlebars. Living across the street from an intimidating dog was one more frightening aspect of life in those days.
***
Thanks to Marie K. Bailey I discovered I could post a deal on my first poetry collection Doll God on this blog. Ten bucks covers a signed copy and postage to a U.S. address I’m so sorry that I can’t offer the same deal to my friends in other countries. However, if you are interested in shipment elsewhere, please email me and let’s try to work something out.
Do you like social media? I don’t mean in an “all in” sense or that you view it through rose-tinted glasses. You can accept its flaws. But in spite of its flaws, do you like it?
I really like Instagram. I wish I could “share” Instagram posts from other accounts to my own without using an outside app. But other than that I like it because it’s very visual. That means it is pretty like Pinterest is pretty. And it doesn’t have a lot of opinions ricocheting all over the place like Facebook does. Trust me: I have my own opinions. I don’t need everybody else’s.
More literary magazines are developing a presence on Instagram, and I like that, too. And more poets and writers. But are we making the most of Instagram for our words?
I’d like to put words with images in a more productive way on Instagram. For instance, tiny poems or micro stories. Have you seen the like? If you do something like this yourself or have seen it done, please share with me usernames.
A concern I do have is that lit mags and writers are posting quotes from new poems and stories on Instagram, and the writing is not tight enough for that purpose. The shorter the piece, the tighter it must be. Here’s an example of what I mean. “The morning sun trembles on the horizon at 7AM.” I made up that lousy sentence, but see how the time is mentioned twice? That is the kind of loose writing I see in some of these quotes.
Next question: I don’t usually post my blog post photo on Instagram when I publish a post. Should I do that? Is it good to do a tie-in like that or is it boring to see too much of the same thing?
One thing about Instagram as social media: I think it might be less social than some others. There doesn’t seem to be a good means for more than two people conversing about a post. You can horn in on someone else’s conversation, but it’s not really in the way you can discuss on Facebook or Twitter. In this way, again, it feels more like Pinterest, which feels the least social of all.
That first poem is a “rewrite” of a famous John Donne Holy Sonnet Batter my heart, three-person’d God which is one of my favorite poems. What do you think about what Day did with the Donne poem?
###
I do have an update on my cat Tiger and the test for pancreatitis. Her test is at the very high end of normal. That result, coupled with her other out of whack test results could mean that she has an inflammation of the pancreas. The question is whether she has an inflammation that can improve, but has started a slow decline (kidney disease, for instance) because of her age (15)–or if it’s the beginning of a very serious disease. She is asking for prayers and healing vibes. OK, I am asking on her behalf, but she does want them!
###
Here is a cool reading opportunity, as well as an opportunity to help shelter animals, at the incredible bargain price of $.99! That’s LESS THAN A DOLLAR, FOLKS! One of the recipients of the funds is Home Fur Good, the shelter where I volunteer!!!!!!!!! An all-female group of cozy mystery writers wrote a story collection which is available for preorder now through the following sites. Summer Snoops Unleashed. Each story is the length of a novella, between 15,000-30,000 words.
Preorder it now because: All the royalties from pre-orders will be donated to the Rescues. Royalties collected after release will go to help authors defray the cost of publishing and marketing. So the time to buy is NOW!!!! I just purchased mine through Apple iTunes!
Maria Grazia Swan is a mystery writer who also volunteers at Home Fur Good. Her story is included in this collection. Maria has published several mystery series, and they are wonderfully written, fun cozies, featuring dogs and cats.
###
Lastly, a lil ole reminder about Kin Types as a good addition to Women’s History Month.
“Kin Types exhumes the women who have died long ago to give life to them, if only for a few moments. Through genealogical and historical research, Luanne Castle has re-discovered the women who came before her. Using an imaginative lens, she allows them to tell their stories through lyric poems, prose poems, and flash nonfiction.”
Suddenly my headshots seemed really out-of-date to me, but I have no budget “presently” for new ones. Daughter to the rescue!!! You may or may not remember that she made the trailer for Kin Types. I asked her if she would take new headshots for me, and she eagerly agreed (yay!).
I’m going to tell you the secret right up front to doing your own headshots and portrait photos: a ring light. Yup, you can get them online for $100 or so. So so cool. I’m not sure what daughter’s brand is, but here is a sample. OK, so if you buy a ring light, your headshots aren’t exactly free. But if you have a family member or friend with a ring light you can borrow it like I did ;). And I borrowed her time and skill.
That is the first one in a series of three. Here is #2:
and #3:
OK, I’m now overloaded on looking at my own pix (something I hate almost as much as hearing the sound of my voice).
That poncho I’m wearing I bought at the art museum in Knoxville. The artist is Judi Gaston. It has a pretty button design. You can’t see it here, but you can in my Instagram post.
My uncle, the one who lives in Arkansas is visiting right now so I am going to try to close comments. Plus I don’t want you to have to say how good the headshots look because I might gag although I so appreciate daughter’s wonderful photography skills.
