I went to a good poetry reading the other evening. But, boy, I wish I the poet hadn’t kept doing things that undermined his own presentation of his own work. The poet violated almost every rule in my unwritten how-to-do-a-poetry-reading rule book. Which spurred me to write down […]
It’s so important to do your homework before sending your manuscript to a publisher. Make sure to take notes for each publisher you research. You will most likely want to compare them to each other before deciding where you want to submit. Make sure the press is the […]
In June, my husband Dan and I were on a road trip out to California to see our son. Somewhere in the Rockies, I said to him, “You know, I think it’s time I went back to get that MFA.” When we returned home, I applied, was accepted, […]
Every community has its taboos, and the literary world is no different. Dirty words like flowery, pretentious, or derivative get bounced around to describe work, but few accusations strike blows at the hearts of the seriously bookish more so than being called a confessional writer. Telling a new […]
When I returned to teaching in October 2015 after a 14-year hiatus, not only did it seem hard to find the time to write, but it also became a challenge to find what to write. The words just were not there. I was learning to juggle motherhood with […]
Every once in a while, I put on my ears and go to a poetry open mike. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve sipped coffee in countless cafés, fidgeted on innumerable uncomfortable chairs, and pondered art—the visual and the spoken kind—while poets belted out their work at […]
As writers we are so often told to “write what you know.” And this is good advice. But this “rule” should not be taken literally, especially when creating persona poems. The poet must create a place where the reader must, as Samuel T. Coleridge famously said, “willingly suspends […]
