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From Mrs. Virtue to the Covid-19 Pandemic: An Interview of Millicent Borges Accardi

I asked Millicent Borges Accardi to sit for an interview about poetry in general and her newest book, Quarantine Highway, specifically. This book was written during the first part of the Covid-19 pandemic. I think you’re going to be as interested in her answers as I was!

How did you come to poetry? Did you read poetry as a child? Write it? Or did you come to it later?

My first grade teacher Hope Virtue was the daughter of Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay and most days she read poetry to the class—whether we liked it or not.

As a teacher, she ran a tight ship, regularly ordering boys into the corner with their hands on their head, and Mrs. Virtue had particular punishments for me and my friends (for talking too much), one trick was she made us sit at our desks and hold our lips shut (like ducks) so, in that sense, she was not my favorite teacher –but the poetry?

Especially on rainy days, Mrs. Virtue would close the grey venetian blinds and read verses her father wrote.  Perhaps magical, but I disliked the teacher at the time so my opinion is complicated. Yet, looking back, I feel blessed. For days spent so early in my life, to know poetry in that way. She never talked down to us. She just read poem after poem.  Such a gift now, I think.

As far as Luther Burbank school knew, poetry meant that we stood up and recited “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer from our textbook, which was nowhere near as interesting as the verses Mrs. Virtue read to us, like “Courage,”

O lonely heart so timid of approach,
Like the shy tropic flower that shuts its lips
To the faint touch of tender finger tips:
What is your word? What question would you broach?

Your lustrous-warm eyes are too sadly kind
To mask the meaning of your dreamy tale,
Your guarded life too exquisitely frail
Against the daggers of my warring mind.

There is no part of the unyielding earth,
Even bare rocks where the eagles build their nest,
Will give us undisturbed and friendly rest.
No dewfall softens this vast belt of dearth.

But in the socket-chiseled teeth of strife,
That gleam in serried files in all the lands,
We may join hungry, understanding hands,
And drink our share of ardent love and life.

She wore turbans, dangly earrings and colorful robes and gestured with arms adorned by heavy brass and gold bracelets (that rang like thick bells when she moved). And, when we were good? There were scoopfuls of pastel marshmallows (taken from a glass jar on her desk) and more poetry. There was always poetry.

Claude McKay By James L. Allen – http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/text/mckay_slide.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8220852

Your new book, Quarantine Highway, probes deeply into how it feels to live in a now that is radically different from a then that we were removed from only by months. Although we are almost three years from the start of Covid now, your poems make me remember how different things were before spring 2020—because we still have not gone back to before: “Do you / remember that time when we held everything / in our arms tightly, as if we knew what we were talking about.” There is a metaphysical sense to these poems that seems different from your last book, Through a Grainy Landscape. Did you plan that or model it on a certain school of poetry or a certain poet’s work? Or was it that you were writing these during the first year of “quarantine” and were questioning our concepts of existence, living, and knowledge?

In a way Grainy Landscape was modeled after the poems and writings I was reading in translation from the Portuguese and the work was less desperate and gentler. There was a hope and an ease and less franticness to my life and my writing There seemed to be an endless pathway of hope, that anything was possible, the lush landscape of Portugal and The Azores—with influences by writers such as João Miguel Fernandes Jorge,  Armando Silva Carvalho, Margarida Vale de Gato  and the title taken from lines in a poem Tiago Araújo:

I’ve driven all night through a grainy landscape, on a motorway with dim and orangey lights

–Tiago Araújo

And the tone for the book is inspired by this passage:

  The light crossing the room between

the two windows is always the same, although

on one side it’s west – where the sun is now – and on

the other it’s east – where the sun has already been.

–Nuno Júdice

 But?  the Covid and its fall-out (especially) impacted our world and put a lid on my writing. I would say. The work in Quarantine Highway are more self-contained and fenced in. Quarantine was written as a way out.  Attempting to reach out and create connections, to deal with what everyone says is “the new normal,” a phrase I hate, as if things were now different and stuck. Forever stuck.

But then also, Good luck? Bad luck? Too soon to tell. There were a lot of pandemic tragedies and also a re-setting of how we do things as a society. One bright spot was, when the national parks were shut down, miraculously native plants and wildlife returned. The same is true for waterways. So many rivers and creeks, with an absence of tourists and fishermen suddenly rejuvenated. And people too, reanalyzed their work-life recipes and started to make different choices, more people working remotely and children being homeschooled, there was more reading and baking bread. A slowing down of the Type A lifestyle that a whole generation of people had been used to—People began to reconsider what they valued versus money and material goods, health and quality of life.

I was desperate to reach out, when writing Quarantine Highway, through social media, Zoom meetings and literary events, books. The written word. Latching onto old habits like knitting and growing food from seed.

The poems in Quarantine Highway were inspired by the work of Emily Perez, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Carl Marcum, Amy Sayre Baptista, Norma Cantu, Ángel García, Eduardo C. Corral, Carolina Ebeid, Diana Marie Delgado, Sheryl Luna, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Luivette Resto, Leticia Hernández-Linares, Ire’ne Lara Silva, Raina León, Javier Zamora, Juan Morales–

Here’s the final poem in the book (that I think lends a sense of hopefulness)

Wet was the Light

from a line by Pablo Neruda

Wet was the light as we saw it

through a threadbare lens

of what we call time or that period

of waiting between what will happen

next and what we regret having happened,

the hard-bad opposite of a world hunch or an omen,

the silent-low sense of doom to come,

a spirit arising in the country we

call home, the desire for isolation,

desperately to be different, the

unexplored nonsense of late.

This is the air in the pastel room when we

are enclosed and locked up by

an intense wondering and fear

of comfort fear of letting our guard

down and forgetting to protect ourselves

from nearly everything we can imagine,

even the scrape of skin upon

our hands, the whispered hello

of a neighbor or a child playing in the creek

below the yard where there are dirt

banks instead of lawn. We are who

we choose to become, are becoming

or perhaps we mean we are who we

are sentenced to be, a corona crown

of in the if and now and meant for always

that time is a path to follow, as we near the

day of the year when June rises

her longest glance of a day and tells us

it is all right to enter.

At the same time that these poems seem metaphysical, they contain beautiful and surprising images of the physical world. In the poem “Yes it’s Difficult,” I was particularly struck by a description of how we interacted with each other before Covid: “.  . . it was how we did things then, / sighing air, sipping in fine water droplets / into each other’s lungs.” It seems unimaginable now. Sorry, no question. I just really wanted to say how much I loved these images in the book.

Thank you!  I appreciate that–

As far as the question,  I had read about The Spanish Flu, from 1919, where  500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with the virus, or 25%–30% of the world population, with over 50 million deaths, where COVID-19 has infected nearly 60 million , with 1.3 million deaths. Both pandemics significantly changed society, and nearly no one was writing artifacts about the Spanish Flu—perhaps the devastation was too much to document? And, for me, there was comfort in writing down what was and is going on, documenting the experience, creating artifacts gave me some comfort.

In the middle of that, I was re-reading TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” and so many parallels came up for me that I had missed when I read the work originally in college. The sparse imagery, the talks of destruction.  Although published in 2022, the poem is an artifact of the aftermath or carnage from the first world war, and the Spanish Flu, among other things, of course.

From an essay by Michael Austin, “The Wasteland” is a poem that imagines what it would be like to be trapped in the wounded land – one incapable of growth, productivity, or renewal. The young Eliot saw this as a metaphor of the modern malaise …

There’s a juxtaposition in some of the poems of scenes from your youth. I found this fascinating and would love to hear you talk about it a bit.

I suppose being cooped up, in quarantine, sends one back to memories. Like being in a cage– all you have to work with are memories so you look back for analogies. You look back for examples from life because outside life is in the past. All we have is the past. Our memories of how the “outside” world used to be, before.

Some of the poems in this collection seem to have begun from a line in the poem by another poet, such as Jane Kenyon, Inês Fonseca Santos, and Pablo Neruda. I began to wonder how you begin a poem. Is there usually a mental “irritant” in the way that a pearl is formed in an oyster? Where do your poems originate?

It depends on the poem. Sometimes a line comes to me or I overhear a phrase, or read a word.  An image dreamt. Many phrases drift in and out of my consciousness  and/but it is the images that stick with me that I tend to write about and pursue further. Many of the poems in Quarantine Highway were inspired by poetry I was reading especially during the early days of Covid when we were all newly terrified and looking for hope and a way out on the written page.

Much of your work involves your identity as a Portuguese-American poet. I’ve read about your connections, but I’d love to hear your description of how you relate to the identity, how it informs your poetry, and your involvement in the Portuguese-American poetry community.

Portuguese-ness, is or can be complicated– Most Portuguese in the US are from The Azores, not the mainland and there were three “waves” of immigration to the US, the last significant influx being in the 1970s, and most of the migrants sought work in industries that did not require a formal education: textile mills and whaling (New Bedford), tuna fishing and dairy farms (California)—So as a child I was discouraged from learning Portuguese or asking too many questions. Because being Portuguese was seen as being “less than” or lower class.  I was admonished to BE American! And yet, I was so interested in my Portuguese heritage, fascinated by it.

My dad was dark skinned and –at Sears (where he worked)– his friends were Mexican -and he easily moved between Spanish and Portuguese languages. We went to festas in Artesia and San Pedro, San Diego — BUT I did not live in a distinctly Luso area like Ferry Street (in New Jersey), “Little Portugal” in San Jose or New Bedford, MA (where the ATMS are in Portuguese)—

In junior high, I was bused across town because of my Hispanic last name, Borges. For me, personally, as a adult and as a writer I have felt freer to explore my own identity  by participating in Portuguese communities, giving readings and workshops, like the Kale Soup for the Soul cooperative, a group of writers reading work about family, food and Luso culture. The terrific lectures and talks that Diniz Borges at the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute presents– In the past twenty years, I have interviewed maybe 60 or 70 writers, artists , actors, musicians in the Portuguese community (in an effort to understand where I come from).

Here is an older poem that illustrates my childhood, trying to explore my own identity (from Only More So, Salmon Poetry 2016):

The Last Borges

Like God and his Eve,

you never passed on

your secrets; I struggled

to learn. Coitadinho, coitadinho.

Never sure which accent to

migrate towards; which window pane

to breathe on for the best cursive fog.

I shunned the loud

Portuguese fights.

The visiting relatives, named for saints,

Over and over, in the driveway

at night, drunken Uncle John or Paul,

or Robert crashed his truck

into the side of our house:

filha da puta!

While you went to night school

two nights a week–for twenty years,

and ate linguiça sandwiches,

I watched and listened.

I would catch you: sitting at

Rudy the barber’s chair

I would sneak up behind to hear

foreign words.

At school, I pronounced our name

as you taught me,

as an Englishman would:

flat and plain, riming it with

a word for “pretty.”

After a while it seemed

that someone else

had heard a grandmother’s

lullabies at night:

a verse that sounded like

a baby’s cries for milk,

wanting the nipple:

Mamã eu quero, Mamã eu quero

As you grow older, papa,

I long for a language that joins us,

beyond our last name,

the space between our front teeth,

and wavy black hair. 

Beyond linguiça,

kale soup and sweet bread.

But, the only Portuguese words

you ever gave me do not stand for love.

Que queres, que queres.

What do you want, what do you want.

How does being a Los Angeles poet inform your work? I wondered this, in part, because of the title of this book. I lived in Riverside County for decades and so I traveled to LA often. An overwhelming image I have of LA, therefore, is the vast freeway system, but of course, you live there, so you have many other perspectives of the city. Do you feel that the city does or does not inform your poems?

It’s funny but even though I was born in Long Beach (LA County) no one seems to consider me an LA writer. Even though many of my poems and essays feature landscape and places in Southern California, like Venice, Santa Monica, downtown LA, Topanga, the beaches along PCH, the mountains. And most of my publications have been in non-local literary journals and presses.  I just had a poem in The Citadel (Los Angeles City College magazine, and it was one of the only local credits I have had. This is also true for readings and events. For some reason, when I get lucky enough to be invited for a featured reading or to teach a workshop, it’s nearly always on the East Coast or in Texas.

But perhaps I did not respond to your question properly? Where I live and where I travel informs my work, definitely. For example, I wrote a lot more gritty poems about the Boardwalk and the coming an goings of the vendors and homeless population when I lived in Venice and since I have been in the hippie enclave of Topanga. My work reflects the creek, the seasonal birds and wildlife from the Santa Monica mountains and the canyon roadways, more rural settings. Definitely affected is the fact that we have only one road, Topanga Canyon Blvd, in and out of the canyon where live and our lives tend to be framed and formed by that one main artery. During floods, storms, fires—we have one very rickety and curvy way out. My hippie shack is near a place called Edelman Park, which is a wildlife corridor, which means we get a fair amount of rattle snakes, coyotes, rabbits, racoon, bobcats, hawks, squirrels and even deer. Once I was on the deck and the backyard was foggy and like a magical spell, two deer arose up from the mist and looked at me—then scampered away. We also have a family of coopers hawks who circle the yard and hang out (looking for food I would imagine) but it s also a mystical experience when one alights on our wooden foot bridge–

Are you already at work on a next project? If so, do you mind sharing what you have in mind or are working on?

I am in the midst of poems LOOSELY based on the psalms, but not in a traditional way, not an interpretation. Mostly, as the psalms are sorted thru and buttressed into the messy world we are still enmeshed in —

Find out more about Millicent Borges Accardi and Quarantine Highway:

Link to Quarantine Highway on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/195344735X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i8

At FlowerSong Press: https://www.flowersongpress.com/store-j9lRp/p/pre-order-quarantine-highway-by-millicent-borges-accardi

Quarantine Highway Blurbs 

With an immigrant lens that defies and armed with a linguistic deftness that challenges, these poems grind against expectations and bust open the façade, the nuance, and go straight to the heart. —Norma E. Cantú
Amid a global pandemic, the ceaseless wildfires of California, a political landscape of turmoil, Millicent Borges Accardi offers us a powerful collection of self-reckoning. —Ángel García, author of Teeth Never Sleep

  • Millicent Borges Accardi, an NEA fellow, is a Portuguese-American writer. She has four poetry collections including Only More So (Salmon Poetry Ireland). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Yaddo, Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA.

http://www.MillicentBorgesAccardi.com

@TopangaHippie  on Twitter

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Some Art Fun for Rooted and Winged

Artist Kelsey Montague has painted art wings all over the country (and elsewhere). One of her murals is at the Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale, Arizona. When my daughter and I had lunch at the mall, she took my pic with the wings to celebrate the 2022 publication of my poetry collection Rooted and Winged.

You can purchase a copy of my book here: https://www.amazon.com/Rooted-Winged-Luanne-Castle/dp/1646628632/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3RCAIJJKAUOVE&keywords=rooted+and+winged&qid=1670344522&sprefix=rooted+and+wi%2Caps%2C394&sr=8-1

 


 

Book description:

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

 

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An Update on My Dear Darling Perry Cat

A couple of months ago I wrote that I was thinking of changing my weekly posts from Mondays. After trying things out on other days, I have to say that I like my old pattern best which is to try for Mondays and if other days arise, then post then instead or additionally. So it’s Monday. And I’m posting.

I want to tell you about my darling Perry (in the photo he’s nestling up against Kana). It’s been years now since he first showed up in our backyard and we trapped him, got him neutered, took him to the shelter where he was all but kicked out. They thought he was feral because he was completely shut down emotionally. I ended up bringing him home and earning his trust over weeks and weeks. I read poetry and stories to him, sang to him, and held his food bowl while he ate. Then one day when I stuck my hand under the bed, he came toward me and started to touch my hand with his paw. That was the moment when I knew he wasn’t feral and was going to be a big sweetheart. Video of Perry Hiding Under the Bed Touching my Hand

Perry has been a member of our family for 5.5 years now, and he’s the King of the Castle. He’s been the babysitter of cats and kittens. He is in charge of it all. I have expected to have him around until I was really old. Imagine my shock to realize something is wrong with his health. He’s got weird poos that have gotten increasingly soft, light-colored, and smelly. He’s lost weight–down a couple of pounds in the last two years. He feels skinny. And yet he’s a picky eater which gives me anxiety as it reminds me of Felix and Tiger when they got sick. On top of the GI symptoms, he suddenly has a level 3 heart murmur. This isn’t a terrible one, but it’s significant and especially for a seven-year-old cat. So he needs medical tests. The GI troubles could be Irritable Bowel Disease–or they could be lymphoma. The vet want to start with an abdominal ultrasound. Perry’s going to get an echocardiogram to examine the heart murmur. Please send all your prayers, vibes, and general good wishes for my dear darling special boy. The ultrasound is Friday, and the echo is in a month (they are hard to schedule). 

As you may realize, we took in my son’s two cats six months ago. Two older cats who have their own ingrained habits and don’t get along that well to begin with is a pretty big thing to bring into a household with three older cats (two seniors plus Perry). It has not been a smooth six months. Not. smooth. at. all. 

The gardener and I are over our Covid (we hope). It wasn’t fun, but it sure wasn’t anything like Valley Fever (I’m only speaking for myself here). 

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Rooted and Winged, please consider it as a way to support the poetry community :).

If you have one and haven’t posted a review at Amazon (and maybe Goodreads, too), I’d sure appreciate it.

If you would like to review it for your blog or a lit journal, please email me at luanne[dot]castle[at]gmail[dot]com and ask for an ARC.

And if you have already bought a copy and reviewed the book, a million thank yous!!!!

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Announcing the Winner and Finalists of The Rooted and Winged Writing Contest

Judging for Writer Site’s Rooted and Winged Writing Contest is completed. The winner of the contest and of the $250 award is Merril D. Smith for her poem “How I Learned”!

How I Learned


recurring patterns, star shapes
and spirals, leaves and shells are echoes,

the vibrations and reverberations of before-time
the ineffable radiance, the glimmering streams

whose crystalline traces created
seas and a world
where we swim before we can fly—

fractals that connect past and future.

Birds sing the harmonies of stars,
trees and seas bear primeval secrets, 
tremulous whispers flow underground and
across continents, waves of knowledge
break on fallow shores,
snippets coast on spindrift, 
we feel the droplets, taste the salt, hear only susurration--

perhaps we understood once,

the whispers, the songs, the patterns,
like puzzle pieces, fragments 
I have glimpsed, 

in a dream,
a tightrope journey over a dark, uncharted crevasse
my arms outstretched for balance,

and then 
free-
      falling 

upside-down and in-between
the visible and the unknown--

but my ancestors spread wings
that covered centuries
to catch me, guide me,

You can, they said
as they showed me that I have my own wings—
unfold them, fly. This, too, is part of the pattern.


The finalists, in no particular order, are:
*Jess L. Parker
*Serena Agusto-Cox
*Stephanie L. Harper 
The finalists will be receiving a Rooted and Winged tote bag. Congratulations to all three because the scores were very close.

A HUGE THANK YOU TO THE CONTEST JUDGES!

K.E. Ogden is a two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize and a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize from Cal State Los Angeles. Her debut collection of poems, What the Body Already Knows, is winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices poetry prize and is in presale now [[https://tinyurl.com/keogdenFLP]]to be released September 2022. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, anderbo, Claudius Speaks, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere, and her plays have been staged at several university theaters. A typewriter lover and avid book artist, her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published by writer Gretchen Henderson as part of the “Unstitched States” project [[https://unstitchedstates.com/]] . ​Ogden lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College and in the Young Writers at Kenyon program each summer in Gambier, Ohio. Visit her on the web at kirstenogden.com [[https://www.kirstenogden.com]]​

K. E. Ogden

Suanne Schafer was born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War. Her world travels and pioneer ancestors fuel her writing. A genetic distrust of happily-ever-afters gives rise to strong female protagonists who battle tough environments and intersect with men who might—or might not—love them. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE depicts an early 20th century artist in West Texas while HUNTING THE DEVIL explores the plight of an American physician during the Rwandan genocide. BIRDIE looks at women’s rights in the 19th century through the eyes of a teenage girl committed to an insane asylum. Suanne has served as an editor for a mainstream/romance publishing house and fiction editor for a literary magazine as well as freelance editing. Follow her on https://twitter.com/SuanneSchaferhttps://www.instagram.com/suanneschafer/ and https://sanneschaferauthor.com.

Suanne Schafer

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a BA in English/Writing from Old Dominion University and an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. Recent fiction publications include Woven Tale Press, Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and Evening Street Review. Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published in 2018. Her debut poetry collection, “Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance,” was published by Paul Stream Press in September 2021. Learn more about her work at https://lizgauffreau.com.

Elizabeth Gauffeau
ROOTED AND WINGED

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Only a Few Days Left to Submit to The Rooted and Winged Writing Contest

Writer Site’s Rooted and Winged Writing Contest closes on July 27!

Read the guidelines below to find out more about the chance to win $250!

Eligibility to enter: Preorder Luanne’s forthcoming poetry collection Rooted and Winged, cost $19.99, link below (if you already preordered the book, you are exempt from this requirement) by July 15. You may enter as many times as you wish, but a preorder is necessary for each submission.

Award: $250 to contest winner. Finalists will receive Rooted and Winged swag.

Dates: Preorder book by July 15. Submit through July 27.

Prompt:

Rooted and Winged explores the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. The human imagination will always strive for flight, even as we feel most comfortable close to the earth. Brainstorm images of flight and falling, earth and sky, then write a poem or flash prose inspired by this activity.

Guidelines: Must respond to the prompt; flash prose (fiction and nonfiction) or poem up to 800 words, no name on the piece itself, identify genre in upper case at the top left of the first page (POETRY, NONFICTION, FICTION), identify word count underneath genre.

How to submit: Email doc, docx, or pdf submission to writersite.wordpress@gmail.com. Do not include any identifying information on your prose or poem. In the body of the email please include your full name (same as used to preorder Rooted and Winged), as well as your email address. If you wish your writer name to be different from your preorder name, please include that as well. Submissions will be passed on to judges anonymously.

CONTEST JUDGES

K.E. Ogden is a two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize and a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize from Cal State Los Angeles. Her debut collection of poems, What the Body Already Knows, is winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices poetry prize and is in presale now [[https://tinyurl.com/keogdenFLP]]to be released September 2022. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, anderbo, Claudius Speaks, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere, and her plays have been staged at several university theaters. A typewriter lover and avid book artist, her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published by writer Gretchen Henderson as part of the “Unstitched States” project [[https://unstitchedstates.com/]] . ​Ogden lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College and in the Young Writers at Kenyon program each summer in Gambier, Ohio. Visit her on the web at kirstenogden.com [[https://www.kirstenogden.com]]​

K. E. Ogden

Suanne Schafer was born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War. Her world travels and pioneer ancestors fuel her writing. A genetic distrust of happily-ever-afters gives rise to strong female protagonists who battle tough environments and intersect with men who might—or might not—love them. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE depicts an early 20th century artist in West Texas while HUNTING THE DEVIL explores the plight of an American physician during the Rwandan genocide. BIRDIE looks at women’s rights in the 19th century through the eyes of a teenage girl committed to an insane asylum. Suanne has served as an editor for a mainstream/romance publishing house and fiction editor for a literary magazine as well as freelance editing. Follow her on https://twitter.com/SuanneSchaferhttps://www.instagram.com/suanneschafer/ and https://sanneschaferauthor.com.

Suanne Schafer

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a BA in English/Writing from Old Dominion University and an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. Recent fiction publications include Woven Tale Press, Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and Evening Street Review. Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published in 2018. Her debut poetry collection, “Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance,” was published by Paul Stream Press in September 2021. Learn more about her work at https://lizgauffreau.com.

Elizabeth Gauffeau
ROOTED AND WINGED

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What’s Going On?

I’m so annoyed that WordPress took away my ability to draft a post in “classic” instead of “block.” I hate block. Any writer would hate block. And you know what? Even my website guy who is a techie instead of a writer hates block editing. If WordPress would pay attention, they would see that blogging via WP is down since they started that ridiculousness.

Things have been tough this past year without WP screwing around with me. Four kitties since July that I’ve had to watch get sick and then help over the rainbow bridge. Family troubles causing me to end up with two more senior cats that I need to integrate into the household (not to mention the family troubles themselves).

I wrote a chapbook of poems, and I submitted it to a contest that I found through a reputable writing website. My chapbook didn’t take one of the top three spots, but it was one of nine finalists. I thought that was great until I got an email from them saying that as one of their “top finalists” my book deserves to be published. I can do that if I cough up $600 for the publisher. What???? So I read more about the press. They say they operate on a cooperative publishing model and are not a vanity press. To clarify: a vanity press is when you want to publish your book and you pay a publisher to do so. There is no possible rejection involved. This “cooperative” press assures first that they want to put their name on your book. Then you pay $600! When is this ever a good idea? Let’s say you have had a book rejected by many publishers and you don’t want to self-publish and you can afford to spend the money. Maybe then? Back to me submitting to their contest. I guess I’m a little ticked off that a legit writing website would let them advertise that contest without explaining about the “hit you up for $600 bit.”

Remember that the writing contest I’m holding right now is LEGIT. 🙂

Remember my tiny books for Doll God and Kin Types? I got them for Rooted and Winged!

You have through Friday to preorder a copy of the actual book if you have not already. I’m still pledging to donate $5 per preordered copy to Liberty Wildlife. Also, if you would like to enter my writing contest (for prose or poetry) which closes on July 27, you must preorder a copy by July 15 to be eligible. Guidelines at the end of this post.

GUIDELINES AFTER ELIGIBILITY (PREORDER ROOTED AND WINGED) MET:

Award: $250 to contest winner. Finalists will receive Rooted and Winged swag.

Prompt:

Rooted and Winged explores the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. The human imagination will always strive for flight, even as we feel most comfortable close to the earth. Brainstorm images of flight and falling, earth and sky, then write a poem or flash prose inspired by this activity.

Guidelines: Must respond to the prompt; flash prose (fiction and nonfiction) or poem up to 800 words, don’t put your name on the piece itself, identify genre in upper case at the top left of the first page (POETRY, NONFICTION, FICTION), identify word count underneath genre.

How to submit: Email doc, docx, or pdf submission to writersite.wordpress@gmail.com. Do not include any identifying information on your prose or poem. In the body of the email please include your full name (same as used to preorder Rooted and Winged), as well as your email address. If you wish your writer name to be different from your preorder name, please include that as well. Submissions will be passed on to judges anonymously.

CONTEST JUDGES

K.E. Ogden is a two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize and a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize from Cal State Los Angeles. Her debut collection of poems, What the Body Already Knows, is winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices poetry prize and is in presale now [[https://tinyurl.com/keogdenFLP]]to be released September 2022. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, anderbo, Claudius Speaks, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere, and her plays have been staged at several university theaters. A typewriter lover and avid book artist, her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published by writer Gretchen Henderson as part of the “Unstitched States” project [[https://unstitchedstates.com/]] . ​Ogden lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College and in the Young Writers at Kenyon program each summer in Gambier, Ohio. Visit her on the web at kirstenogden.com [[https://www.kirstenogden.com]]​

Suanne Schafer was born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War. Her world travels and pioneer ancestors fuel her writing. A genetic distrust of happily-ever-afters gives rise to strong female protagonists who battle tough environments and intersect with men who might—or might not—love them. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE depicts an early 20th century artist in West Texas while HUNTING THE DEVIL explores the plight of an American physician during the Rwandan genocide. BIRDIE looks at women’s rights in the 19th century through the eyes of a teenage girl committed to an insane asylum. Suanne has served as an editor for a mainstream/romance publishing house and fiction editor for a literary magazine as well as freelance editing. Follow her on https://twitter.com/SuanneSchaferhttps://www.instagram.com/suanneschafer/ and https://sanneschaferauthor.com.

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a BA in English/Writing from Old Dominion University and an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. Recent fiction publications include Woven Tale Press, Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and Evening Street Review. Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published in 2018. Her debut poetry collection, “Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance,” was published by Paul Stream Press in September 2021. Learn more about her work at https://lizgauffreau.com.

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Filed under #AmWriting, Book promotion, Books, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Poetry book, Poetry Collection, Publishing, Research and prep for writing, Writing, Writing contest

Guidelines for The Rooted and Winged Writing Contest

Writer Site’s Rooted and Winged Writing Contest closes on July 27! Read the guidelines below to find out more about the chance to win $250!

Eligibility to enter: Preorder Luanne’s forthcoming poetry collection Rooted and Winged, cost $19.99, link below (if you already preordered the book, you are exempt from this requirement) by July 15. You may enter as many times as you wish, but a preorder is necessary for each submission.

Award: $250 to contest winner. Finalists will receive Rooted and Winged swag.

Dates: Preorder book by July 15. Submit through July 27.

Prompt:

Rooted and Winged explores the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. The human imagination will always strive for flight, even as we feel most comfortable close to the earth. Brainstorm images of flight and falling, earth and sky, then write a poem or flash prose inspired by this activity.

Guidelines: Must respond to the prompt; flash prose (fiction and nonfiction) or poem up to 800 words, no name on the piece itself, identify genre in upper case at the top left of the first page (POETRY, NONFICTION, FICTION), identify word count underneath genre.

How to submit: Email doc, docx, or pdf submission to writersite.wordpress@gmail.com. Do not include any identifying information on your prose or poem. In the body of the email please include your full name (same as used to preorder Rooted and Winged), as well as your email address. If you wish your writer name to be different from your preorder name, please include that as well. Submissions will be passed on to judges anonymously.

CONTEST JUDGES

K.E. Ogden is a two-time judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize and a two-time winner of the Academy of American Poets Henri Coulette Memorial Prize from Cal State Los Angeles. Her debut collection of poems, What the Body Already Knows, is winner of the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices poetry prize and is in presale now [[https://tinyurl.com/keogdenFLP]]to be released September 2022. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in Kenyon Review Online, Brevity, anderbo, Claudius Speaks, Louisiana Literature and elsewhere, and her plays have been staged at several university theaters. A typewriter lover and avid book artist, her digital quilt piece “My President: A Politics of Hope” was published by writer Gretchen Henderson as part of the “Unstitched States” project [[https://unstitchedstates.com/]] . ​Ogden lives in Los Angeles where she teaches at Pasadena City College and in the Young Writers at Kenyon program each summer in Gambier, Ohio. Visit her on the web at kirstenogden.com [[https://www.kirstenogden.com]]​

K. E. Ogden

Suanne Schafer was born in West Texas at the height of the Cold War. Her world travels and pioneer ancestors fuel her writing. A genetic distrust of happily-ever-afters gives rise to strong female protagonists who battle tough environments and intersect with men who might—or might not—love them. A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIRE depicts an early 20th century artist in West Texas while HUNTING THE DEVIL explores the plight of an American physician during the Rwandan genocide. BIRDIE looks at women’s rights in the 19th century through the eyes of a teenage girl committed to an insane asylum. Suanne has served as an editor for a mainstream/romance publishing house and fiction editor for a literary magazine as well as freelance editing. Follow her on https://twitter.com/SuanneSchaferhttps://www.instagram.com/suanneschafer/ and https://sanneschaferauthor.com.

Suanne Schafer

Elizabeth Gauffreau writes fiction and poetry with a strong connection to family and place. She holds a BA in English/Writing from Old Dominion University and an MA in English/Fiction Writing from the University of New Hampshire. Recent fiction publications include Woven Tale Press, Dash, Pinyon, Aji, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, and Evening Street Review. Her debut novel, Telling Sonny, was published in 2018. Her debut poetry collection, “Grief Songs: Poems of Love & Remembrance,” was published by Paul Stream Press in September 2021. Learn more about her work at https://lizgauffreau.com.

Elizabeth Gauffeau
ROOTED AND WINGED

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Filed under #AmWriting, Book promotion, Books, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Poetry book, Poetry Collection, Publishing, Research and prep for writing, Writing, Writing contest

Up to My Cat Ears

writersite.org

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 forever
These girls loved the app “Mouse for Cats” on my ipad.

Here’s a link to preorder my new book Rooted and Winged. https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/rooted-and-winged-by-luanne-castle/

I will donate $5 to Liberty Wildlife in Phoenix for each preorder if you let me know and give me your email address for a donation email from LW.

Going to try to catch up on work and blog-reading this week, so I’m closing comments. Make it a good week!

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Presales Now for Rooted and Winged

My full-length collection Rooted and Winged needs your help. (Please forgive the drama!)


PRE-ORDER HERE

Release date: September 9

Book description:

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!

If you already ordered a copy Thank You!!!!!

all my ghosts and angels become each

other and then me with a hinted outline of wings.

from “The Shape of Me”

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When I Got Kicked Out of Girl Scouts

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.

PRE-ORDER HERE

Release date: September 9

Book description:

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.

 

all my ghosts and angels become each

other and then me with a hinted outline of wings.

from “The Shape of Me”

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Filed under #AmWriting, Book promotion, Books, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Poetry book, Poetry Collection, Publishing, Research and prep for writing, Writing