Tag: publication announcement

Updates

Newly published poem: “Tanager’s Cantrip”

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I am absolutely delighted that my poem “Tanager’s Cantrip” was selected as editor’s choice for the April ekphrastic challenge over at Rattle literary magazine. My little magic spell of woodland birds and dappled light is on the front page today, and will shortly be listed in the archives of the ekphrastic challenge for future reading. I’m very grateful to both the editors and the artist; I loved Stephanie Trenchard‘s painting as soon as I saw it. I also really enjoyed the artist’s choice of poem as well, so I recommend that you check that one out when the two April winners are up in the archive!

A small songbird sits on a branch which rises diagonally across the image from left corner to right. The bird is a saffron-crowned tanager, with a bright yellow head with black mask around its eye, bright blue feathers on its breast and belly, and black and yellow striped feathers on its wings. The background is a blur of green suggesting leaves.
Saffron-crowned Tanager (Tangara xanthocephala), used with a creative commons license, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saffron-crowned_Tanager_(Tangara_xanthocephala)_(cropped).jpg

What the series editor, Megan O’Reilly said about my poem:

“I was moved by ‘Tanager’s Cantrip’ before I even looked up the word “cantrip,” but when I read the definition–‘a magical spell’—I had a moment of ‘ah, of course.’ With its alliterative, chanting rhymes, this poem is an incantation, a blaze of magic language to match the visual magic of Stephanie Trenchard’s painting. The light, color, and movement in the image all contribute to its air of enchantment, and yet the figure of the girl is motionless and beige—an artistic choice that seems to lend credence to the poet’s use of the word still in ‘magic lives within you still.’ The girl in the painting, one could speculate, struggles to connect with the beauty around her. The last line of ‘Tanager’s Cantrip,’ seems to remind her that, despite this perceived separateness, she is where she belongs.”

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Happy Announcement: Another published poem!

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I was incredibly thrilled to hear that the Mass Poetry Festival was returning for 2021, as it has been an incredible source of inspiration and community for me for years. I was even more happy to see that as part of this year’s festival, they were running a contest for the creation of ekphrastic poetry (a personal favorite). They invited any and all to respond poetically to any of 12 works of art from those in the Montserrat College of Art community, and the top poem for each piece would be exhibited online and also be sold as broadsheet posters to support MassPoetry.

I am honored and excited to say that my poem, “Manifest,” inspired by the painting “Being Perfect is a Very Unrealistic Expectation” was chosen to be part of the exhibition and the broadsheet publication.

The girl is a ghost
made of moonlight and movement
blue smoke in the mirror
of a reflecting pool world.

You can use the link above to jump straight to my poem, or you can visit the whole exhibit here:

Mass Poetry Online Ekphrastic Gallery

If you are so inspired, you can purchase any of the broadsides from the gallery here. (Bit of vanity, direct link to mine is here.)

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Looking forward to rain!

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A few weeks ago, when the Emily Dickinson Museum posted a call for short poems for potential inclusion in their #ArtofRainPoetry event for ArtWeek, I got very excited.  I’ve enjoyed the many photos I’ve seen from MassPoetry’s previous rain poetry installations, and I’m always in favor of projects that get poetry out into public view.  Last fall I had a haiku, “Robin and Rabbit,” selected to be part of the Minuteman Bikeway Public Art project, though sadly I never managed to get a good picture of it in situ, as the chalk paint was laid down one day and the next four days were heavy wind and rain, so many of the poems were obscured by wet leaves.

This spring, however, I can look forward to a rainy day, as my poem “If Spring (Recalcitrance)” was one of five selected from over 80 submissions to be part of the Dickinson Museum’s installation on the sidewalks of Amherst.

Starting this weekend, you can find my poem and 5 others, on the sidewalks of Amherst.  We’re due for rain both Saturday and Sunday, so keep your eyes peeled! (Bonus: my poem is going to be located only a block from Bart’s, so you can grab some ice cream at the same time!)

Rain poem map

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Seeking New Landscapes? Read these!

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Writing that is strongly situated in its setting has always appealed to me, as a place-based writer.  So when I saw the call for submissions for “landscapes” from all the sins, I had a lot of fun looking through my ‘ready for sending’ folder and hit ‘submit’ faster than the Flash on a sugar rush. To my great glee, one of my personal favorite poems also caught the editors’ eyes, and is now published in Issue 5 of all the sins: contemporary landscapes.

800px-Guillaume_Vogels_-_De_vijver_in_de_winter
Guillaume Vogels, De vijver in de winter, 1885, oil on canvas. Currently owned by Stedelijke Musea Sint-Niklaas, used with creative commons permission.

You can jump directly to my poem here: “Belgian Skylight.”

I wrote “Belgian Skylight” when I was living abroad, teaching kindergarten in Brussels. It was a phenomenal year in which I learned a lot and traveled a lot and spent a lot of time watching the light change out my window in my garret bedroom at the top of the house I shared with two other teachers. There’s a kind of light in a Brussels winter that was especially conducive to writing, probably because it was the kind of blank white that was reminiscent of a page waiting for words, both promising and melancholy. As we head into the cold season (finally!) here in New England, it’s lovely timing for this piece to come to life.

I highly recommend the whole of issue 5; there are some gorgeous pieces of art within, both visual and literary, so do go check it out!

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“Than Longen Folk to Goon on Pilgrimages”

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It’s spring, and I celebrated “Aprille with his shoures soote” by heading to England for a dose of literary pilgrimage, much in the spirit of my third and latest essay for all the sins, “And I must follow, if I can.” (Issue 3 is up in its entirety, and it’s great, go check it out!)

We hit London, Bath, Lyme Regis, Portsmouth, and Brighton in 6 days (whew!).  Literary moments included seeing the musical of Matilda (Roald Dahl), a  walking tour of literary London in Bloomsbury (Virginia Woolf and her cohort, Dorothy Sayers, Randolph Caldecott, TS Eliot, and more), saying hi to Shakespeare and Austen in the National Portrait Gallery, more Shakespeare, not to mention Beatles lyrics and more in the British Library, and that was just in the first two days.  We also visited the Jane Austen Centre, the Assembly Rooms, and the Circus and Crescent in Bath, strolled the Cobb in Lyme Regis, and said “A little seabathing would set me up forever!” at least twice in Brighton.  And I had a lot of Horatio Hornblower (CS Forester) feels at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. We also drank a lot of tea, and ate a lot of scones and Welsh rarebit. It was a stupendous trip.

Here are a handful of snapshots of some of the gorgeous, inspiring, hilarious, and memorable moments from my whirlwind Jane-Austen-inspired vacation:

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5 Tips for Your Inspiration Expedition

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Not all those who wander are lost. All those who wonder are found.
Detail from a map in the collection of the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

A few weeks ago, all the sins published my reflections on and exhortations to the wonders of gathering artistic inspiration in museums. (If you missed it, you can find it here.)

This week, they’re back with my best suggestions on how to outfit yourself for a museum exploration. Matthew Henson didn’t head for the North Pole without a coat, after all!

So if you’re suffering writer’s block, or it’s been ages since you went on that school trip to your local historical society, here are my 5 tips on using museums for inspiration.

…Inspiration can come from a fossil in a natural history collection, a scrap of wallpaper in a historic house, the view from a national park peak. What would a taxidermied specimen have to say to its collector? What words still resonate in the walls of an old structure? Whose hands molded the pot whose shards sit in that case, and how do the pieces evoke the whole?

 

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On stealing inspiration, and why I love museums

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museum_indiana_jones.gif

My features essay, “Art Heists for Art’s Sake,” is now up to kick off Issue 3 of the lovely UK literary journal, all the sins!

…the day I stood in front of that Breugel painting and talked poetry with my mother was a turning point for me. Since then, I’ve worked inspiration from other art forms into my creative writing, both poetry and prose, both consciously and unconsciously. Museums have also become my career, both as a museum educator and as a museum advocate. Fortunately, one creative practice informs the other in a rewarding cycle.

You can read the full article here.

 

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Newly published:”The Storyvore”

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Tell me a story...

Have you ever described yourself as the sort of person who devours books? I have. I’ve also called myself a ‘cultural omnivore,’ since there are very few things in this world that I don’t find at least a little (or a lot) interesting.

But what if stories were someone’s actual sustenance? And what happens to the person who tells them?

I wondered, and then I wrote. And now you can read the resulting short fiction (for free!) over at the literary journal, Zetetic!

Read “The Storyvore” on Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry

cropped-ZeteticLogo

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Find out what the bees know

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Zip right on over and check it out! "Bee Line logo" by SPUI at Wikimedia Commons
Zip right on over and check it out! “Bee Line logo” by SPUI at Wikimedia Commons

What’s the buzz, you ask? The summer issue of Window Cat Press is out, and in it are four of my poems, accompanied by photography by the ever-delightful Michele Morris. Check them out, and all the other goodies within here!

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Sunshiny Summer News: Poems in Print!

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Happy summer, all! In the wake of last week’s downright delightful Supreme Court decisions on health care and marriage equality, I have less-momentous but much more immediately personal good news; I have four poems that are being published this summer on Window Cat Press.

Window Cat is an online literary journal run by a fabulous trio of poet/artist/editors, who are dedicated to bringing the work of young & emerging poets, writers, and artists to the wider world. Their mission is to “seek to celebrate, inspire, innovate, and play.” About the poems that will appear there, they said:

“We were charmed by the interplay of light and color in Michele’s photographs and thrilled by the rhythmic beauty of your words.”

You can imagine my key-smashing delight!

kermittypes

Publication date will be sometime mid-summer; as soon as the issue is live I will be posting the link here, as well as on Palettes of Light, as several of the poems to be published are part of that collection, with integral accompanying photography by the lovely and talented Michele Morris, as mentioned above.

In other happy news, I will also be reading this fall at Mass Poetry’s U35 reading series at the Marliave in Boston, on September 22nd. Hope to see you there!