I’m thrilled to have my poem,”Inside the House We Lived In When Dad Went Broke,” published as part of the Poem-A-Week project at the Sims Library of Poetry.
Sims Library of Poetry is a fabulous resource for inner city Los Angeles. This is a description from their website: “We are the first black-owned poetry library in the state of California. We aim to engage with the South L.A. community by offering a space to read, write, study, perform, and appreciate poetry.”
In January, I had another ekphrastic piece, this time a poem, taken at Visual-Verse. I neglected to mention last time that we only get one hour to write these to the art prompts. It’s a very intense process. https://visualverse.org/submissions/the-tournament/
Main Street Rag has published my review of Justin Hamm’s Drinking Guinness with the Dead. While I can’t post a copy of the review as it’s a print issue, I can tell you I give it two thumbs up. Hamm’s work is really tied to the Midwest and its vast once-farmland, so while anyone would love it (I think), Midwesterners would especially cherish it.
My daughter’s wedding was a year ago this coming Sunday. So look what I made for daughter and son-in-law. A wedding junk journal.
I had to find this nifty little suitcase after I realized that with the fragility of the book (cuz junk) and their lifestyle the book wouldn’t last long without protection. I was able to add in their wooden ring boxes, little place cards, extra photos, and the napkins from their previous courthouse wedding where we drank blue prosecco and ate cookies. Last year’s wedding was the whole shebang because that’s what they like.
See inside on the left? That’s a little clutch I made out of plastic grocery bags to store the cassettes of their wedding music.
That project was loads of fun, but now I’m about hearted and laced and sweetthinged out.
The January issue of The Wise Owl is devoted to the poetic form, the haibun. I really like this form because it’s a prose poem that is completed by an ending haiku. I like how the prose poem goes into detail and then the haiku has the ability to comment on or reinforce the prose poem.
Two of my poems are published in this issue–a big thank you to Editor Rachna Singh. The first one, “When You Knew,” is a poem about my father being a twin. The second one, “Chicken Vision,” began because I became fascinated with the fact that chickens have mono-vision, which means that the left eye is far-sighted, and right is near-sighted. Isn’t that the coolest piece of info?! Here is the link (and ignore the bio which is somewhat incorrect–especially the word especially).
I’m so happy that Book of Matches has published two of the poems from my upcoming chapbook Our Wolves. A big thank you to editors Kelli and Nicholas! These are both persona poems–one from the perspective of the wolf in the Little Red stories, the other from that of the so-called rescuer character–in this case, a woodsman.
Here is the link to “You All Been Waiting for a Wolf Confession” on page 6 and “I’m a Woodcutter, Dammit” on page 39. Here is the link so you can check out the whole issue which is chockful of good writing:
Here are screenshots of my poems for your convenience.
While I was eager to kick 2022 to the curb (as I know a lot of you were), I had news at the end of 2022 that will make 2023 a pretty grim year again. It’s about my boy Perry, and here is a link to that story.
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.
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.
Six years ago, I published a piece of flash fiction at The Story Shack called “Parking Lot Superhero.” I posted a link on this blog and yadda yaddaed about fiction giving me more freedom for structure. The story was one of the first flash pieces I wrote.
Here’s a confession. I don’t even know why I wrote that about freedom because the truth is that this story is completely true except for the names. So maybe the freedom actually came from changing the names. And by changing the names I was able to change the structure and how I ended up structuring it made all the difference. So, yes, I submitted nonfiction as fiction by changing the names.
This story is not one of my most well-written (and at some point I might revise it), but it’s still one of my favorites because the hero of the story (not me) was such a larger-than-life character in real life.
Going back to my title–Is it Real Life or is it Fiction?–maybe fiction is often real life, just many different aspects of real life glued together in a different combination and order.
One more thing. Why did I want to come clean about this story being true? Although I published it as fiction to protect “Jack” and his family story, I have felt guilt at not giving him credit for being a hero. I still won’t publish his name, but I feel better letting you know that he is a real living hero.
The poem takes place at the lake where my family lived summer. In the following photo, I am about 11 or 12. The lake was not large, but seemed like three lakes that flowed together because of the configuration of the shoreline. In fact, everyone called the different parts first lake, second lake, and third lake. The last was shallow and swampy with weeds sticking up out of the water. You could see the lake bottom from your boat.
Grateful to Sheila-Na-Gig online journal and editor Hayley Mitchell Haugen for publishing two of my wolf poems. These poem are not in Rooted and Winged, but rather in a future project. I really love these poems (haha) and hope you do, too.
