Tag Archives: poetry

Date: by | Categories: Humor, My Childhood, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Klutzy Me: Childhood Blunders and Other Disasters

Rescue Work - Dayton (Bain News Service, Publisher)

Flood – Rescue Work – Dayton (Bain News Service, Publisher)

“Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.” – Confucius

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been called a good dancer (no, not by the guy in the mirror), but I admit, I’m not someone you probably want to give a sword to . . . unless, you know, it’s time to wield it, time to slay the dragon or defend the kingdom. I’ll be all in, then, focused on my movements, on the intention. My body might even cooperate then.

To just carry around, though, probably not such a good idea.

Even though I grew up playing sports, you could say I was a wee bit klutzy as a boy. I’m a bit suspicious, though, that my little sister crept into my room one night while I was sleeping and adjusted the controls to my center of balance.

No, I can’t prove that. Yet. But here’s what I mean.

SPILLED MILK

When I was about eight-years-old, my mom asked me to go to the store for some milk. Simple enough of a request, right?

The store, it should be noted, was a mere block-and-a-half away, other side of the street, on the way to my favorite hide-and-seek location, the cemetery.

This was back in the day of glass bottles and penny candy. It was the coolest store, and I have to find a way to get that store and the old man who owned it into one of my stories.

I rode my bike, because, you now, it was faster.

I had things to do, after all, like playing football or baseball in the street with my friends. Fortunately, my friends were all in their own houses at the time and were NOT waiting for me on my front stoop because THAT would have been mortifying, since, well, I sort of ran into a snag on the way home.
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Date: by | Categories: Humor, Misfits, My Childhood, On Writing, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Family, Friends, and Our Stories: Continued

famsmallIn the beginning, FAMILY is pretty much all we know.

While we’re infants, they’re perceived as an extension of us (in regards, mostly, to how they meet or neglect our basic, inherent needs).

Most of the early truths and discoveries we make are learned through our experiences with family. Our values, our beliefs and attitudes, are influenced by them (as we grow to accept or to resist theirs).

As we age, as we approach and then navigate the muddy waters of adolescence, our FRIENDS assume a much larger role in shaping us (or at least in influencing how we shape ourselves) into the people we’ll become.

All of this may be true. All of it may, and does, and will influence our stories.

But, as Willa Cather stated: “most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.” I can say that most of my personal stories, most of the memories I draw upon when I write, are from that time in my life. They’re related to experiences I had with my family, and adventures I had with my friends back then.

A few of them, in particular, have in some way influenced the novels I’ve been working on recently, but not in the ways you might think. Not for the events themselves, in most cases, but for something more.

Here are a few specific events I recall from when I was between six and nine years old:

The Great Carpet Incident
Broken Bones & Concussed Noggins
Shattered: Or Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Body
The Land of Up & So Much Falling
Climbing the Walls
Rooftops & Hurricanes

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Date: by | Categories: Misfits, My Childhood, On Writing, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Family, Friends, and Our Stories

Lafayette Wattles & His Little Sister“Other things may change, but we start and end with family.”

What is family? For some, it is the heart, the marrow, the soul. For others, the dragon, the demon, the darkness. If we’re lucky, family is a light that guides us toward our own light, the one inside us.

I’m one of the lucky.

I don’t feel guilty for that, but I AM hyper-aware that not all families are created equal, and that when it comes to family I struck the mother-lode (and father-lode and sister-lode, so to speak).

I don’t come from money. My parents didn’t go to college. They got jobs after high school (before and after the Army for my dad, before and after my sister and I were both school age for my mom) and they spent their entire adult lives working extremely hard.

I was lucky because my grandparents never felt entitled. My parents never felt entitled. My sister and I never had a reason to feel entitled.

We did, however, feel happy! And loved!
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Date: by | Categories: Empathy, Humor, My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Poetry of Witness, Stories I Inherited, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Try a Little Tenderness

A Mother's Touch by Electric Echoes

A Mother’s Touch by Electric Echoes

For the past week, one word has been creeping around in my head, popping up over and over and over. That word is TENDERNESS.

Maybe it’s because my mom went away for a little while and I’ve had some time with my dad that I might not have taken otherwise.

I know tenderness may not be one of those words you usually associate with two grown men bonding. It’s not typically part of the Y Chromosome Playbook they give you as a boy to commit to memory and take to heart, yet I think it might just be one of the most crucial reasons why my friends are my friends (female and male) and why my family and I are so incredibly close.

Not only do each of those very special people in my life have a capacity for tenderness, they have a propensity for sharing it (with others and with me).

As a young boy, I suppose I looked up to my dad first and foremost as this great athlete, as this man’s man to use an old-school phrase, for being strong and brave and able to do just about anything. Today, I still appreciate all that, but the thing that strikes me most profoundly is my dad’s ability to be that guy and to still share moments of tenderness.

And, in looking back, I think what truly connected us even when I was a boy, regardless of how many sports I played and how many other things we had in common, was that part of my dad’s personality, that part of his soul, which he revealed in those moments.
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Date: by | Categories: Events, Feedback, On Writing, Poetry, Projects, Submiting, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

A Different Point Of View

A Different Point of View

A Different Point of View by Simon Daniel Photography

“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.” ~ Calvin and Hobbes

I guess you could say this is a post about truth, whatever that might be, which makes it about fact and reality (double ditto whatevers), which makes it a post about perception, really, a post about point of view.

And what does that even mean?

Sure, point of view is a way of considering a thing, not limited merely to our sensing the thing, but involving an attitude as well (about the thing being sensed, yes, and often about ourselves).

Cold Hard Fact: sometimes the words we least want to hear are the words we need to hear most. Sometimes they provide us (or force us to take) a different point of view.

I suppose a resistance to the words we don’t want to hear might be a form of self-preservation (of the ego, at least, and maybe of one’s dreams). I mean, giving up on our dreams seems to be more common than chasing them once we reach a certain age (that sort of cynicism seems to be taking hold in adolescence these days which is such a terrible shame).

If you’ve somehow found a way to hold onto those dreams, to chase them, your dream-preservation response is probably heightened.

Given the myriad pressures on us from so many directions to put aside the dream (you know, to let go of the “fanciful”), for the pursuit of the practical, I get the inherent need to defend our pursuit, but not at the sacrifice of reason. After all, sometimes the perceived criticism, sometimes the feedback, the insight, the advice, the idea being shared with us (wanted or not) has merit.

Sometimes it bears, at the very least, a seed of truth.
Which is often also a seed for growth.
If we recognize it, that is. If we allow ourselves to perceive it, to consider it, to weigh it, to examine it from various points of view.

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Date: by | Categories: My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Projects, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Second Chances

Auto Polo

Talk About a Moment When You Might Want a Do-Over

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.

Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ~ Scott Adams

There’s a common saying about life, how not everyone gets a second chance. Only, I wonder if maybe it should really be more like: “Not everyone takes their second chance.”

Of course, that might be because we don’t always see the chance for what it is or we might not feel we’re in a position to act on it or because we just can’t get ourselves to give up on our original plan. Seems as though, for many people who find themselves in unbearable situations, it’s not until something negative, something unwanted, something maybe even tragic happens before we decide to make a change we probably knew all along somewhere deep down inside us was a change we needed to make.

Sometimes in life, it’s a starting over, a starting from scratch.

Most of the time though, it’s really us setting off on a new path, not from the very beginning again, but from wherever we’d gotten to before the change. It’s like that with writing too.

Funny how much life and art have in common.
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Date: by | Categories: Findings, My Childhood, On Writing, Poetry, Projects, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Art: A Knocking From Your Soul

Just a small version of The Buffalo Hunt by William Robinson Leigh

Photo of small section of the painting The Buffalo Hunt by William R. Leigh

“Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul —
and you answer.” ~Terri Guillemets

That’s so true. Especially when it comes to creating art.

Of course, we’re also given an opportunity to connect with a deep down part of ourselves when we experience the art others have created which reminds of a quote by Rodin: “The main thing is to be moved, to love, to hope, to tremble, to live.” Spending time with Family and with Friends does that to me. WRITING (which is me answering the knocking from my soul) does that to me. ART often does that to me.
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Date: by | Categories: Findings, Humor, On Writing, Poetry, Uncategorized

Dear Billy Collins

Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins

Just Two Books by Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins

If you had uttered the word “POETRY” when I was a boy, I’d have probably run, sort of the way I would have reacted to the words FIRE or SNAKE or to the phrase WANNA KISS (though, as with poetry, I later came around regarding one of those, as well).

English (now called Language Arts) was the ONLY school subject I have ever flat out hated.

Most of that was due to grammar exercises (which seemed, at the time, to be an ingenious method of torture invented by adults especially for teens). Part of my aversion, however, was also due to that other devious cruelty called poetry. These were the sort of topics that could make a somewhat hyper person (meaning me, of course) start banging his forehead against text books and desks and lockers and (if we had grammar and poetry the same day) off the dull-colored cinder block walls of the back hallway.

It sure seemed as though the poems to which we were introduced were secret coded messages and we were supposed to decipher them without any cool decoder rings or fancy machines. It was like translating some long-lost foreign language that looked remotely familiar, sure, but made no sense at all.

Somehow, I managed to get through most of my undergraduate years avoiding anything that might have even been mistaken for an English class.

Eventually, however, I ran out of options. I was twenty-six. And my life changed forever.
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Date: by | Categories: Events, On Writing, Readings, Retreats, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

Events

New Harmony's Roofless Church

New Harmony’s Roofless Church

RETREATING:

I’m writing from Historic New Harmony, Indiana (I’m here taking part in the 2nd Annual Extraordinary Time Writer’s Retreat)!

Look, any chance I get to be in New Harmony with my computer (and, especially, with a notebook and pen), is one I welcome with unbridled exuberance. I’ve been to very few places that emanate the creative energy and the sense of equanimity of New Harmony and both of those things are invaluable to a writer.

Add to that a tranquil setting with an interesting history (and some pretty cool historic buildings and parks), as well as that rare combination of quiet time and a separate space to write, removed from the many obstacles of the daily grind, and you have a writer’s dream.

Of course, one of the best things about the retreat is getting to spend a few days with one of my favorite people (and a talented writer), Terry Price, as well as some other warm, wonderful, creative writers.
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Date: by | Categories: Findings, On Writing, Residencies, Retreats, Submiting, The Writer's Quest, Uncategorized

The Gift of Time

Wild and Precious Life by Cynthia Frost

Wild and Precious Life

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver

It’s one thing to “plan” to follow your dream with “your one wild and precious life” (which might just be the hardest thing to do, really, considering all the pressure you’ll probably face to do everything but that), but having a vivid imagination, having something to say, even finally deciding that you’re going to be a writer, all of these essential things aren’t enough.

You still have to find a way to sit down and write.

After all, the rest of your life can make that very hard to do.

That’s why one of the very best things I’ve done for myself as a writer was to apply to an artist residency.

The semester I graduated from Spalding University, one of my favorite writers and mentors, K.L. Cook, sat on a panel about “Life After the MFA” and, while some people spoke about the seemingly insurmountable odds that stood between each of us soon-to-be-grads and our dreams of living as published writers (the sort of stuff they tend to leave out of the recruitment brochure of any MFA program, but a truthful aspect of the writer’s life), Kenny focused on things we could do from that moment forward to give ourselves the best chance of realizing our dreams.

He didn’t side-step the challenges. He nodded in agreement several times when other people were sharing rather grave experiences. He also chose to provide us with action steps we could take to move us closer to that ultimate goal.
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